Old Yorker

  • Walpurgis Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Valborgsmässoafton

    Gustaf Edgren (1935)

    The film is being shown at the BFI as part of the Ingrid Bergman season, which includes pictures she made in Sweden before emigrating to Hollywood.   The basic structure and imperatives of the story are formulaic – true love is tested and the lovers separated, eventually the good are rewarded and the bad are punished.   There are some absurdities, particularly in propelling the story to its happy ending, as the romantic lead simply extricates himself from the foreign legion that he’s joined, returns home to hand himself in – then emerges from the police station in the next shot with everything sorted out.  In most respects though, the film seems intelligently fresh.    It begins in the office of a local newspaper, the Morning Post – with a debate among the editor and his colleagues about the reasons behind and the implications of the falling Swedish birth rate.   This introduces the story of Lena (Bergman), the daughter of Fredrik Bergström, the senior journalist on the paper.  A spinster (and expected to devote herself as necessary to keeping house for her father), she gives up her job as the secretary of Johan Borg, a successful businessman, because her unspoken and, as far as she can tell, unrequited love for him is proving too painful.   It turns out the love is requited:  Borg’s own marriage to the cold but promiscuous Clary has become increasingly unhappy because of her refusal to start a family.   The plot involves Clary’s need for an abortion, an attempt at blackmail as a result of this, and the consequences of an incident in which the blackmailer is shot dead.  (The gun is fired by Clary, in a virtual act of self-defence on behalf of her husband, but in a way that appears to incriminate Borg himself.)

    Gustaf Edgren moves from one scene to another unemphatically.  In the first part of the film, this tends to make the story seem dramatically underpowered.  The fact that it was (I assume) not yet technically possible to make instant editing transitions between scenes gives the film a slightly disjointed quality.  But Edgren’s unassertive style begins to pay dividends:  it leaves you wanting more, sometimes makes you realise – after the scene is over – that something dramatically or emotionally significant has occurred without its being crudely stressed.  The acting is very well orchestrated.  I enjoyed the essentially (but not reductively) comical flavour and playing of Bergström’s colleagues at the newspaper, especially the editor Gustav Palm (Erik Berglund), who has a look of G K Chesterton – and an especially good moment when he confesses to being a covert milk-drinker in the office.  Palm has kept this secret by putting the milk into a professionally acceptable beer bottle.  The rotten wife (Karin Kavli) and the blackmailer (George Rydeberg) are played in a more conventional melodramatic style but Lars Hanson as Borg is interestingly impersonal and opaque in the early stages – it’s not easy either to understand Lena’s passion for Borg or to read his motives.     And the pairing of Ingrid Bergman and Victor Sjöström is fascinating.  There’s a scene in which daughter and father face off that seems a much larger moment – at this distance in time a watershed in Swedish cinema:  the incipient international screen star confronts the illustrious director of silent films.   You can see in Bergman’s acting here the qualities that made her so distinctive in 1940s Hollywood – the combination of propriety and sensuality, the ability to radiate a character’s feelings as if from within rather than through histrionic detail.   Sjöström brings a fine blend of theatricality and naturalism to the role of Bergström.  He creates a fully convincing portrait of a socially responsible and intelligent man whose professional success increases his impregnability as a respected patriarch but who is a benign tyrant in his relationship with his daughter.

    The BFI note comprises brief extracts from Swedish and New York reviews of Walpurgis Night at the time of its release (the former are highly enthusiastic, the latter patronising – and shocked at the abortion theme), along with an ‘NFT programme note’ by David Shipman.    Shipman says that ‘This film attempts a seriousness it doesn’t afterwards maintain by starting with a discussion as to whether crowded housing conditions is [sic] the reason for the low birth-rate’.   I think the screenplay, by Edgren and Oscar Rydqvist, is thematically more consistent and dramatically more sophisticated than this suggests.   The film seemed to me pro-children – and to express that view in a range of ways:  in the opening discussion (where Bergström, who deplores the falling birth rate, commands a respect that his callow colleagues don’t); in the family gathering for Bergström’s sixtieth birthday (and the song sung there by his grandchildren); in the morbid consequences attaching to the abortion; in the lesson learned by Bergström that he needs to let his daughter live her life and by his fellow workers at the Morning Post that they should get on with procreating; in Palm’s conversion from alcohol to milk; in the fact that  Walpurgis night in Sweden marks the advent of spring, the start of new life.  Some of Edgren’s and Rydqvist’s illustrations of their theme may be questionable now but the variety of these is admirable and they steer as clear as possible of sentimentality.  Apart from its considerable historical interest, Walpurgis Night is greatly entertaining and emotionally satisfying.

    8 January 2009

  • Wakolda

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lucía Puenzo (2013)

    The alternative title is The German Doctor and the doctor in question is Josef Mengele.  In 1960, he is living, as part of a seemingly large community of German expatriates, in Patagonia, under the pseudonym Helmut Gregor.  As played by Alex Brendemühl, Gregor is suspiciously inscrutable from the start of Wakolda, which Lucía Puenzo adapted from her novel of the same name.  And the audience – or at least an audience watching this Argentine film with English subtitles – knows his identity from fairly early on:  Gregor is reading a newspaper and the subtitle helpfully informs us of the headline attracting his interest:  ‘Israeli agents search for Mengele’.  The title character is a doll, who belongs to a young Argentine girl Lilith (Florencia Bado).  The girl’s mother is called Eva (Natalia Oreiro).  Gregor gains Eva’s trust in order to inject Lilith with growth hormones; he also takes a keen interest in Eva’s latest pregnancy.  You’d have liked to have been a fly on the wall when Eva and her husband Enzo (Diego Peretti) decided on a name for their daughter:  ‘I know – since I share a name with Adam’s better-known wife, let’s call our baby girl after his Apocryphal first mate, created from the same earth as Adam rather than from his rib.  It may come in handy if she and I ever become characters with heavily symbolic names in a bad historical drama film.  Not precisely symbolic, of course, but it’ll help with the sinister flavouring if the movie’s central figure is a man notorious for his genetic experiments on human beings’.

    When, at the start of Wakolda, Gregor picks up the doll that Lilith has dropped and gets into conversation with the child, she remarks that Wakolda has no heart.  Gregor then asks if Lilith isn’t a bit old to be playing with dolls.  ‘How old you think I am?’ she replies.  He guesses nine or ten; it turns out she’s twelve but unusually small for her age.  This doesn’t quite answer Gregor’s original question – and it raises another (which remains unanswered):  does Lilith want to encourage people to think she’s younger than she is? – but this doesn’t concern Lucía Puenzo.  All that matters to her is that the exchange has conveyed the message that Lilith is physically underdeveloped and that her alter ego also has an organic deficit.  Wakolda is heartless so that Lilith’s father, a talented craftsman-cum-inventor, can design one for the doll – along with new hair and eyes.   Enzo and his wife have just inherited a hotel owned by Eva’s deceased mother but they seem to have very few guests apart from Gregor so that Enzo, even though his wife is pregnant with twins, has plenty of time on his hands to pursue his ambition of creating porcelain dolls.  Why do Enzo’s talents correspond with Mengele’s malign science – is Lucía Puenzo making a point about how men treat women?  I doubt it – I think she’s merely into image-making.  Gregor offers to bankroll the manufacture of the dolls:  he does so partly in a vain attempt to ingratiate himself with the suspicious Enzo, partly because the finished products presumably remind him of his own engineering interests – but chiefly to enable Puenzo to show rows and rows of the spookily identical dolls.

    Her camera also spends a lot of time moving over Gregor’s notebooks, full of unsettling anatomical drawings, but she isn’t remotely interested in credible character development or dialogue – or even in keeping things tidy.  For example, that opening conversation between Gregor and Lilith is followed by a sequence in which Lilith’s family are driving to the hotel they’re taking on.  One of Lilith’s brothers, who’s anxious about the welfare of the pet insect he has in a jar, reads about the creature and how it sheds a skin.  He asks his elder brother and parents what ‘shed’ means but they reply, incredibly, that they don’t know.  When, a few screen minutes later, there’s a conversation about the insect with Gregor, who mentions the skin-shedding, the little boy is no longer interested in finding out what this means; a bit later, however, Puenzo has the same child putting boldly frank questions to the German doctor.  When Gregor first asks Eva about her pregnancy and history of pregnancy, why doesn’t she react – or indeed tell him to mind his own business?  (This is before she thinks she needs to rely on him.)  I’d no idea how Lilith came into possession of Gregor’s notebooks, given that his fellow Nazis arrange for his transport to a new hiding place at the climax of the film.  (Lilith survives to provide, presumably as an older woman, bits of narrative voiceover that refer to the notebooks.)

    Wakolda may claim to be based on fact but using the Mengele story for a psychosexual thriller of this kind verges on the tasteless.  To add insult to injury, the film isn’t in the least thrilling.  There’s nothing much the actors can do in the airless aesthetic world created by Lucía Puenzo.  Diego Peretti and Florencia Bado are the best – perhaps because it’s easier to sympathise with Enzo and Lilith.  Elena Roger, as a photographer who has a fixed significant look in her very blue eyes from the word go, and Guillermo Pfening, as Gregor’s excessively creepy German sidekick, are the worst.

    13 August 2014

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