Film review

  • Summer Interlude

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sommarlek

    Ingmar Bergman (1951)

    The relationship giving the film its title is sunny but shadowed too.  The particular quality of the Scandinavian summer – the awareness that daylong light is transient and will  turn to daylong darkness – naturally helps create the atmosphere.  Gunnar Fischer’s chiaroscuro black-and-white images of sea and sky sustain it.  The young lovers are Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson), an aspiring ballet dancer, and Henrik (Birger Malmsten), a college student.  Their romance takes place on an island on the Stockholm archipelago, where Marie visits her aunt and uncle for a summer break, and Henrik lives with his elderly aunt.  Although increasingly enraptured by each other’s company, the youngsters’ mood of sweetness and light is volatile.  Marie, knowing Henrik to be thin-skinned, enjoys teasing him.  She’s unnerved, late one evening, by the hooting of an owl.  In one of their conversations, Henrik admits to occasional, fearful imaginings of tipping over into a great darkness.  As autumn approaches, a few days before he’s due to return to college and Marie to the theatre in Stockholm, Henrik has a diving accident and dies from his injuries.

    The cut-short first love, which is the film’s centre, is an interlude too in terms of the structure of the piece – or, rather, a series of interludes.  The narrative begins thirteen years later; Marie’s recollections of her time with Henrik are extended flashbacks from the present-day framework of the story, which Ingmar Bergman wrote with Herbert Grevenius.  Marie is now a prima ballerina, rehearsing for a production of Swan Lake.  Admired as a dancer, she’s reputedly a cold fish in her offstage relationships – the latest, with journalist David Nyström (Alf Kjellin), is evidently fractious and failing.  In her dressing room, Marie takes delivery of a parcel and is stunned to find it contains Henrik’s diary of the summer they spent together.  Due to technical issues, the Swan Lake dress rehearsal is postponed from afternoon to evening.  This gives Marie the opportunity to take a ferry over to the island where she knew Henrik, and to remember their romance.

    Marie’s brief reunion at his house on the island with her uncle Erland (Georg Funkquist) is variously revealing.  It was he who had Henrik’s diary sent to her at the theatre:  Erland pocketed the diary when he caught sight of it in the hospital room where Henrik died, and has kept it through the intervening years.  We learn too that Erland took Marie away for the winter following Henrik’s death, supposedly to help her get over it.  He succeeded, in the sense that she returned ‘walled up’ against the anguish of losing Henrik.  It’s strongly implied that an affair with Erland, which Marie bitterly regrets, played its part in numbing her heart.  She recalls taunting Henrik with jokey threats that, if he didn’t swear undying loyalty to her, she’d become Erland’s mistress.  It was just at that moment the owl call spooked Marie.

    In his 1982 biography of Ingmar Bergman, Peter Cowie maintains that ‘Each of Bergman’s major films constitutes both a distillation of its predecessors and a great step forward into new realms of expression and technique … Prison was the first of these; Summer Interlude the second’.  The latter is certainly remarkable as both a self-sufficient drama and a foreshadowing of important Bergman themes and memorable motifs in the films that followed (tonally different though these often were).  The transient midsummer setting points towards Smiles of a Summer Night.  In one of their light-hearted moments, Marie and Henrik eat wild strawberries together; Mrs Calwagen (Mimi Pollak), Henrik’s cancer-ridden aunt, not only has the cadaver-to-be look of Professor Borg’s aged mother but even describes herself as a corpse.  On the eve of Henrik’s fatal accident, Mrs Calwagen plays chess with her priest (Gunnar Olsson).  It’s a very different pairing from the chess contestants in The Seventh Seal but the plump, pompous priest remarks that he ‘feels death beside me’.

    Marie increasingly shares that feeling, anticipated by her bumping into the priest on the ferry she takes to revisit the island.  Perhaps suppressing the memory of their last meeting, she says she hasn’t seen him since her confirmation in his church; the priest reminds her they did meet on other occasion.   Soon after arriving back on the island, Marie sees Mrs Calwagen walking ahead of her.  This is one of the film’s most complex and potent images.  It appears ‘the corpse’ is still alive, thirteen years on; her survival makes Henrik’s premature death seem all the more unfair.  Yet Bergman and Gunnar Fischer visualise the black-clad old woman as such a weird, inhuman figure that she might be a ghost or, at least, a figment of Marie’s imagination.  His spacious summer house, in which the presumably widowed Erland now lives alone, has a mausoleum vacancy.  The place has already been prepared for complete abandonment during the approaching winter.  The furniture is covered – shrouded.

    Returning to the theatre and to her dressing room after the dress rehearsal, Marie encounters the dance company’s ballet master (Stig Olin).  Helpless against the fate that has governed her life, Marie has likened herself to a ‘painted puppet on a string …if I cry, the paint runs’.  When we first see the ballet master, slouching against a wall of the dressing room, he himself has the limp, ungainly attitude of a disused marionette but that initial impression is deceptive.  He wears costume and make-up for the role of Doctor Coppélius, explaining that another dancer’s indisposition means he’s taking on this role, which he’s often played before, in a forthcoming performance of Coppélia.  This and his Svengali manner with Marie combine to suggest the ballet master is also a puppet-master – that is, the creator and would-be controller of a plaything[1].

    While stressing the transience of a performing career in ballet, this culminating sinister figure also tells Marie her sole purpose in life is to be a dancer.  He seems to recommend, in other words, that she carry on immuring herself in the stage world where she’s lived for years.  This pivotal exchange has an unexpected outcome, though.  The ballet master’s speech is briefly interrupted by David’s arrival in the dressing room.  Marie introduces him, surprisingly after her earlier tetchy manner with David, as ‘the one person who’s kind to me in real life’.  As the ballet master takes his leave, he plants a kiss on Marie’s lips.  This is alarming but proves not to be the kiss of death on her readiness to escape psychic stasis.  Instead, she decides to show Henrik’s diary to David.

    As might be expected, Bergman realises the hectic theatre atmosphere vividly, through editing tempo and minor characters like the long-serving box-office man (Douglas Håge) and the elderly janitor (John Botvid).  He’s also at pains to emphasise the punishing slog of ballet:  Marie’s colleague, Kaj (Annalisa Ericson) moans about the aching feet she cools in a bowl of water.  (Kaj also has a fag in her mouth, which nicely dates the film.)   The stage make-up in Summer Interlude is more than a mask.  It’s almost a disfigurement – most obviously in the ballet master/Coppélius’s grotesque appearance, including a false nose.  In the film’s closing scene, Marie removes her ‘paint’.  What emerges doesn’t quite have the bloom of her teenage face but she does look much younger.

    The ageing effect of the heavy pancake and dark lines emphasising her eyebrows serves a simple practical purpose, as well as an expressive one.   It was a tall order for Maj-Britt Nilsson, in her mid-twenties at the time, to look convincing as the fifteen-year-old Marie.  (It’s not clear why Bergman made the character quite so young, rather than, say, college boy Henrik’s exact contemporary.)   Even without her theatre make-up, Marie, on her return to the island, looks older than the twenty-eight she’s meant to be.  By putting years on her, Bergman makes it easier for Nilsson to achieve the gulf in spiritual age between the teenage girl and the still young woman.  Maj-Britt Nilsson may not have been in the same acting league as the leading actresses of later Bergman films but she gives (as in To Joy) an impassioned and very engaging performance.

    Birger Malmsten partners Nilsson beautifully.  Although nearly thirty when the film was made, Malmsten is thoroughly believable as a boy on the cusp of manhood, thanks to his slim physique and to the emotional registers he gives Henrik, whose halting, tentative manner complements Marie’s vital aplomb.   He’s almost comically self-pitying when he laments no one really loves him except his dog, Gruffman; but Malmsten also creates a deeper, more authentic melancholy, as if Henrik, at some level, intuits the fate in store for him.  (Gruffman, for his part, has a hangdog air that’s very appealing.)  The playing throughout is just about impeccable.  Stig Olin’s ballet master is impressively unaccountable.  Renée Björling has only a small role as Erland’s wife but the sad, resigned look she gives her faithless husband is a memorable moment.  The well-fed complacency of Georg Funkquist’s Erland is repellent at first yet Bergman isn’t entirely devoid of sympathy for him.  Erland’s rueful nostalgia, albeit for a lecherous past, somewhat redeems him.  No character in Summer Interlude is dismissed easily.

    Erland’s decision to give Marie Henrik’s diary after many years is a necessary plot contrivance but there’s little else in this splendid film that comes across as contrived.  The resolution of the story and the protagonist’s situation is a fine balance of sorrow and consolation, as Marie is confirmed in the knowledge that she can’t recover the joyful intensity of her first love but discovers a new willingness to re-engage with life offstage.  As far as I know, a short animated sequence that comments humorously on Marie and Henrik’s feelings for each other is unique in Bergman’s cinema.  All in all, the film fully deserves its reputation as the first of his three great aestival pictures of the 1950s, paving the way for Summer with Monika and Smiles of a Summer Night.

    17 August 2020

    [1] It’s a little confusing that the film opens with a notice of the company’s current repertoire that announces dress rehearsals for Swan Lake and, rather than Coppélia, Petrushka.  There’s no further reference to Petrushka, whose title character is, of course, a puppet.

  • White Lie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas (2019)

    Katie Arneson (Kacey Rohl), a dance student at college in Hamilton, Ontario, is something of a campus celebrity and heroine.  Her face is all over the place on posters promoting her crowd-funding campaign, to cover her next round of cancer treatment in Seattle.  It’s a new, expensive form of immunotherapy and there’s still a way to go to hit the $10,000 target; but a fundraiser is coming up in the next few days, and Katie is popular – liked and respected by fellow students, loved by Jennifer (Jen) Ellis (Amber Anderson), her English girlfriend.  The thing is, Katie doesn’t have cancer at all.

    As a liar, Katie is as conscientious as she’s fluent.  She shaves her head; exposes an upper arm scar – the legacy, she says, of surgery to remove her original melanoma; takes tablets that include (along with placebos) appetite suppressants.  She’s a picture of ill health.  She tells people she tires easily but that doesn’t stop her from dancing – which makes her all the more admirable.  Katie’s also in the process of applying for a $2,000 bursary to be awarded to a student with serious health issues.  Julia Stansfield (Christine Horne), one of the college staff, thinks she stands a good chance of success but the awarding body hasn’t received copies of her medical records and the application deadline is imminent.   Katie looks convincingly puzzled as she tells Julia she’s already submitted the documents – no problem, though, she’ll bring further copies to the departmental office tomorrow.  In fact, there is a problem.  The urgent need for paperwork attesting to her illness triggers accumulating complications that supply the tangled-web plot of White Lie.

    The Canadian writer-directors Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas (both in their mid-thirties) reveal Katie as a fraud at an early stage, inviting us to engage with a protagonist whose behaviour is indefensible.  This is a bolder undertaking than it would be in a film where the offender is a flamboyantly entertaining monster rather than, as Katie is, a credible ordinary person.  Lewis and Thomas later reveal something of her troubled adolescence.  She blames her father for her mother’s suicide, in light of which Katie faked a different kind of illness so as to delay returning to school.  Even so, this backstory hardly amounts to an explanation of her present deception, let alone an excuse for it.  We have to deal with Katie as she now is.  By avoiding emphatic censure of her, Lewis and Thomas ensure that we decide what to think of this dominant central character.

    Their focus on Katie allows Lewis and Thomas to describe, as if peripherally but to shocking effect, the corruption of medical professionals who enable her to prolong her pretence.  She regularly gets her medications from Owen (Connor Jessup), a lab worker.  She asks if he knows someone who could supply fake records and Owen puts her in touch with a young hospital doctor called Jabari Jordan (Thomas Olajide).  He obliges, reluctantly and at a price.  (Jordan’s one-off fee is exactly the value of the bursary Katie’s planning to use his forgery to obtain.)  Later in the story, when her credibility has been publicly challenged, Owen gets Katie an appointment with Dr Becker (Darrin Baker), an older practitioner.  He’s more than willing to devise a detailed programme of subterfuge for the longer term – at an even higher price.

    Successful fund-raiser she may be but Katie can’t afford the doctors’ charges without help from elsewhere.  The devoted, well-off Jen is always ready to provide the cash Katie needs and always swallows the untrue story of what she needs it for.  But the tight schedule for paying Jordan, in order to get her medical records filed with the bursary application, forces Katie to seek help from a different quarter – her estranged father, Doug (Martin Donovan).  White Lie features good naturalistic acting through the whole cast and Katie’s pivotal exchange with her father is a highlight.  Doug listens, wary but apparently sympathetic to what Katie is saying, before explaining that he and his new partner have remortgaged their home and he doesn’t have the money to help.  Still speaking quietly, he goes on to say that he wouldn’t help even if he could.  Doug, recalling what happened with her in high school, doesn’t believe his daughter.

    The structure of White Lie requires Kacey Rohl to carry the film, and she does.  Rohl  conveys especially well how lying has become second nature to Katie: the fact that she’s well aware of what she’s doing makes her actions no less compulsive, though she’s calculating too.  When Doug leaves a voicemail on Jen’s phone, Katie manages to delete it and block further calls from him on the number.  Doug then takes the more drastic step of putting a post on Katie’s crowd-funding page, announcing, ‘with a heavy heart’, what he’s sure is her deception.  Kacey Rohl is effective, too, in realising Katie’s aptitude for attack-as-the-best-means-of-defence, for making herself the injured party.  When she sees what Doug has done, she marches round to the home of her college friend Kadisha (Zahra Bentham), whose mother Colette (Sharon Lewis) is a lawyer:  Katie wants to sue her father.  Later on, she breaks off from a showdown with Jen to take a phone call from a local radio station.  They’d like to interview Katie as part of a series about people on the receiving end of social media abuse or allegations.  She accepts with alacrity.

    Jen is horrified to think she’s being deceived but when they resume their heart-to-heart after the radio station call, Katie is even more emotional than her distraught partner.  She says she’s always been fearful of losing Jen, worried that the cancer might drive Jen away.   It’s not just in this big scene that Katie, suggesting she‘s the one liable to be betrayed, exploits the idea that people not suffering from cancer can feel uneasy being close to someone who is.  You wonder if this is also an element of why Katie has been putting on an act in the first place:  her illness, as well as making her the centre of attention, allows her to keep her distance.  Both those things make her special, as does the combination of getting noticed and guarding a secret.  (Lewis and Thomas make more imaginative use of the isolating effects of cancer than the writer and directors of another recent film, Ordinary Love.)

    Does Katie have genuine feelings for Jen?   If she loves her (and feels loved by Jen), isn’t she inclined to tell Jen the truth and hope to be forgiven?  The answer to both questions could be yes; the way that answer emerges is, typically of White Lie, singularly complicated.  After Becker has outlined how they go about sustaining her seemingly life-threatening condition, Katie confounds him by asking about the possibility of a programme to work towards remission.  Is this because her life with cancer is getting just too complicated or because she sees a potentially happy future with Jen (even if she means to arrives at it via another lie)?   Colette is likewise astonished when Katie, after seeking (and getting) assurance that her feigned illness in high school isn’t something she can now be punished for, asks if that would also be the case if she was inventing illness now.  In the short exchange that follows, Katie virtually admits to shamming her cancer – before reiterating that she intends to sue Doug.  Her admission to Colette is startling not only because it’s unexpected but also because of how Katie expresses it:  this isn’t a confession of wrongdoing, just a matter of fact.  It’s also a foretaste of what will happen in the film’s remarkable closing scene.

    Katie’s tearful protestations to Jen have the desired effect.  The two go to bed reconciled;  in a taxi en route to the radio station, a few hours later, Jen is insistent that Katie mustn’t be secretive any longer about her cancer treatments:  from now on, Jen says, she wants to be with her all the way.  The absolute assurance of support appears to trigger another sudden outburst of sincerity from Katie, as she waits with Jen outside the room where her interview will take place.  Soon afterwards, she’s called in.  Jen doesn’t react dramatically to what Katie tells her.  She looks through the glass of the recording studio at her partner’s face, animated by her new feelings of security in their relationship and the prospect of going on air to execrate her father.  Jen’s face also wears an unaccustomed expression that says she now realises the truth.  When Katie inadvertently came clean to Colette, the latter gave her the card of a colleague to contact if Katie really did want to start legal proceedings.  Colette then levelly asked Katie to leave her house.  Similarly calm, Jen prepares to exit the radio station and, perhaps, Katie’s life.  The message of both sequences is that, for Katie, dishonesty was the best policy.

    I liked and admired White Lie in spite of its strongly unpleasant subject.  Lewis and Thomas have created an authentic character study rather than a case study, and cleverly use Katie’s personality to justify what would otherwise come over as implausible bits of plotting.  When you watch that early sequence in which Julia Stansfield brings up the missing medical records, you wonder how Katie could possibly have expected to avoid the issue.  As you get to know her, you accept that she would dare to hope she might.  By the same token, Jen’s endless credulity might seem hard to accept; but she is in love with Katie, and Katie is repeatedly persuasive in justifying herself to Jen.  It’s refreshing to see a new independent film from North America in which the characters aren’t defined by their sexual or ethnic identity.  Katie and Jen are lesbian, Jordan is a man of colour, as Becker is white:  their actions aren’t explained by these factors.   Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas have the skill and integrity not to stack the deck or preach to the converted.  They demand their audience make up its own mind.

    12 August 2020

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