Film review

  • Searching for Ingmar Bergman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Margarethe von Trotta (2018)

    In January 1960 Margarethe von Trotta, born in Berlin and raised in Düsseldorf, felt she was suffocating in West Germany and moved to Paris.  The French New Wave was gathering momentum but it was seeing The Seventh Seal in Paris that made von Trotta realise she wanted to make films.  After working as an actress for some years, she first moved behind the camera with The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975), co-written and co-directed with her then husband Volker Schlöndorff.  Many cinema and television pieces later, this is von Trotta’s first feature documentary and the second such piece in the space of a few months (following Jane Magnusson’s Bergman – A Year in a Life) to explore the personality, work and legacy of Ingmar Bergman.

    Von Trotta’s opening contributors include Liv Ullmann and Gunnel Lindblom, who talk about Bergman’s working methods with actors:  his instruction ‘Allow me to see that you have understood’, quoted by Ullmann, registers particularly strongly.  Searching for Ingmar Bergman then goes on to juxtapose, to rather mystifying effect, extracts from Bergman films and interviews with esteemed directors and writers – a couple of them prone to high-sounding generalisations that von Trotta’s selection of excerpts seems almost designed to expose as such.   Jean-Claude Carrière declares that a core preoccupation is ‘the religious concept of guilt’ until God gradually disappears from Bergman’s world.  A clip of Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika reminds us that neither guilt nor God has much of a role in that celebrated early work.  Carlos Saura praises Bergman’s actresses, in creating their characters, for managing ‘the difficult balance between taking a religious position, an almost mystical position, and being an object of sexual desire’.  Von Trotta then puts on the screen one of the many exceptions to this type, Liv Ullmann’s Alma in Hour of the Wolf (and, later on, arguably the outstanding exception:  Ingrid Thulin’s Märta in Winter Light – in the gruelling scene in which Gunnar Björnstrand’s pastor scorns her).  We see von Trotta during conversation with these talking heads and there’s nothing in her visible or verbal reactions to suggest that she disagrees with what they’re saying.  Yet she proves it’s an oversimplification.

    Her film goes up a revelatory level thanks to an interview with Bergman’s youngest son Daniel.  Now in his mid-fifties, he starts by recalling the tricky collaboration with his father on Sunday’s Children (1990), which Ingmar wrote and Daniel directed.  He moves on to describe, with candour but no rancour, the limits of their relationship away from the film set.  He admits that he doesn’t miss either of his late parents, whom he always thinks of as Ingmar and Käbi (Käbi Laterei, Ingmar’s fourth wife) rather than as father and mother.  Although he can’t feign distress about this, Daniel says he’d be horrified if his own child came to feel the same way about him.  He and his half-brother Ingmar Jr (a retired airline captain) recall the family celebrations of his father’s sixtieth birthday in 1978:  this was the first time most of Ingmar’s nine children had met each other.  (The gathering was at the insistence of Ingmar’s fifth and last wife, Ingrid.)  Daniel also remembers a conversation with his father in old age, when Ingmar, in self-pitying mood, lamented how much he missed his actors.  A half-sister of Daniel’s, also present and exasperated, said she wished Ingmar could say, just once, he missed seeing his real children and grandchildren.  ‘But I don’t’, her father replied.

    Once she’s talked with Daniel, von Trotta is confronting the perennial dilemma of the Ingmar Bergman biographer – how to balance praise for his artistic achievement with censure of his personal conduct, in both his professional and private lives.  Unlike Jane Magnusson, von Trotta doesn’t start piling up evidence for the prosecution before reverting to hagiography.  The best of her interviewees give balanced accounts of their experiences of Bergman, especially the film producer Katinka Faragó.  In the mid-1950s, he was getting through script girls even more quickly than he was wives.   Faragó’s longevity was extraordinary:  she first worked with Bergman in script supervisor/continuity clerk roles on Dreams and Smiles of a Summer Night (both 1955), the start of a thirty-year partnership.  Two of her most striking comments give a flavour of her unblinkered perceptions.  She says that Bergman ‘had a method, “Never argue with an actor.”   So he took it out on other people on the set’.  But she doesn’t believe he was an outsize ego:  ‘He never thought that he was good enough’.

    The crucial importance of her time in Paris and her subsequent career in Germany may explain why von Trotta chooses to have several French perspectives as part of her ‘search’ (Olivier Assayas and Mia Hansen-Løve as well as Jean-Claude Carrière) and to devote what seems disproportionate screen time to the fruits of Bergman’s exile in West Germany.   Liv Ullmann mentions early on his desire to be remembered as a playwright:  discussion of his work for theatre is limited almost entirely to the programme of plays he staged while in Germany (adaptations of A Doll’s House and Miss Julie and of his own Scenes from a Marriage).   A case is made, albeit by a Swede, that From the Life of the Marionettes, made in Germany and in German, is an especially underrated part of the Bergman oeuvre.

    The Swede in question is Stig Björkman and he has interesting things to say, especially about the ageing gay character in From the Life of the Marionettes, who describes himself as ‘an infantile old codger’.  The phrase has considerable resonance with an emerging theme of von Trotta’s film and might be taken to refer to Bergman himself:  we’re told that he always remained a child at heart, that this was why he was such an exceptional director of child actors, that it may explain also the mutually unsatisfying relationships between him and his own children, that he refused psychotherapy which would have helped him to ‘grow up’ but, as a result, threatened his continuing creativity.  It’s another of his compatriots, Ruben Östlund (the man behind two conspicuously overrated films of recent years:  Force Majeure and The Square), who delivers the most bizarre remark in this documentary.  Östlund maintains that Bergman didn’t snobbishly regard highbrow and lowbrow drama as incompatible – unlike, says Östlund, most present-day arthouse film-makers.  To illustrate the point, he suggests that Scenes from a Marriage was influenced by Dallas.  It’s true the former has been described as high-class soap opera.  It’s also true that Scenes from a Marriage was first screened on television in 1973 and Dallas in 1978[1].

    Ruben Östlund deserves thanks, though, for taking the opportunity to ask Margarethe von Trotta what is her own favourite Bergman film.  He doesn’t get an answer:  she merely reiterates that The Seventh Seal, though not her favourite, is the one that changed the course of her life.  This is a significant moment in Searching for Ingmar Bergman because it points up how little von Trotta explains the quest of her title.  She gives the impression that she decided to make this documentary purely because Bergman named one of her films, The German Sisters, as one of his greatest favourites.  It’s not as if she knows him only through his work and wants to hear from people who knew the man:  she describes a visit he paid her and Volker Schlöndorff at their home in Munich.  At the start, she runs the opening sequences of The Seventh Seal and supplies an excellent voiceover summary of what is shown in them.  For the most part, though, von Trotta is a listener:  a most attentive one (and her keen blue eyes magnetise the camera) but I wish she’d said more in response.  I much prefer her film to Jane Magnusson’s but it leaves you unsure what it’s aiming to do – beyond presenting another collection of material fascinating to us Bergmaniacs who can’t get enough of him.

    11 May 2019

    [1] To be precise, what Östlund says is that Bergman ‘was inspired on Dallas [sic]’.  David Jacobs, creator of the latter, has acknowledged that Scenes from a Marriage, bizarre though this sounds too, gave him the idea that became the Ewing family saga.  Some reviewers of Searching for Ingmar Bergman have assumed this is what Östlund is referring to.  Although it might seem possible from the single phrase ‘inspired on Dallas’ that they’re right and this is merely a semi-slip of the tongue, there’s little doubt from the context of what Östlund says that he sees the influence as the other way round:  ‘When he did Scenes from a Marriage, he was inspired on Dallas ­– you know, this TV soap series and he had a way of combining like the arthouse cinema and a very commercial American industry and he didn’t see any problem with that’.

     

  • Loro

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paolo Sorrentino (2018)

    I didn’t much fancy seeing another Paolo Sorrentino film but he’s so admired I felt I ought to and the trailers for this week’s high-profile new releases supplied stronger reasons to avoid them:  Vox Lux features flashing lights as well as Natalie Portman; hard to know where to start with Tolkien.  Besides, although the internationally released version of Loro lasts two-and-a-half hours, that’s much less than Sorrentino served up to his compatriots.  In spring 2018, this portrait of Silvio Berlusconi and his circle – the title translates as ‘Them’, though it could also be a play on l’oro (gold) – arrived in Italian cinemas in two instalments, with an interval of sixteen days between the openings and an aggregate running time of 204 minutes.

    Sorrentino starts with a lengthy disclaimer, described by some reviewers as tongue in cheek and ‘lawyer-baiting’.  Loro, set in the period between 2006 and 2009, ‘stems from its authors’ independent and free imagination’ (the screenplay is by the director and Umberto Contarello).  It draws on news stories but these have been used to create ‘a purely artistic film’ and with no intention ‘to represent an objective truth’.  Sorrentino’s visual imagination and skill turn out to justify the phrase ‘artistic film’; but if his disclaimer is code for ‘I’ve done what I liked’ with real people and events, the result, ironically, is less free than that might suggest.  Silvio Berlusconi is so well known a figure that, if you’re going to present him on screen – rather than use him as the basis for a Berlusconi-type politician and crook – you set up very definite audience expectations.

    These include that Loro will be a hatchet job.  Unlike older Italian film-makers like Marco Bellocchio and Nanno Moretti, Sorrentino isn’t publicly left-wing but no one familiar with Il Divo (2008), his biography of Giulio Andreotti, will have anticipated an admiring treatment of the outrageous political sensation that Berlusconi once was.  The film is, however, easier on its leading man than many would have guessed, at least in showing his septuagenarian vulnerabilities.  It’s less decidedly unsympathetic than, to cite an obvious recent example, Adam McKay’s account of Dick Cheney in Vice.  All this may go some way to explaining Loro’s commercial under-performance.  (According to Wikipedia, it’s taken less than $8m, having cost around $21m to make.)  Berlusconi supporters will have stayed away on principle.  Press reaction and word of mouth have probably combined to disappoint and deter Berlusconi haters.

    Whatever the reasons for Loro‘s poor box office, people who’ve not seen it haven’t missed a great deal.    Berlusconi is now recognised as a trailblazer for the media-savvy demagogues who’ve won power in Western democracies in more recent years.  He was the first Italian prime minister to assume that office without prior experience in government or public administration.  Sorrentino has him say at one point ‘I wish I could run the country like my businesses’ and several times illustrates his infantile egoism .  The resonances come through loud and clear.  As a cultural phenomenon, Berlusconi is no doubt interesting to read about.  He might be an absorbing documentary subject too but he makes for an inert drama.  Not only does his inescapably strong public image dictate proceedings; the film also concentrates on a period of relative inaction in Berlusconi’s career.

    As usual, Sorrentino’s lead is Toni Servillo, who also played Andreotti and the journalist protagonist of The Great Beauty (2013).   A formidable actor, Servillo is constrained here and not just because the make-up department, carefully replicating Berlusconi’s embalmed look, seems to have encased his face:  the script doesn’t allow him to go anywhere interesting with the character either.  Perhaps the make-up has been overdone to distract attention from physical differences between the actor and the man he’s incarnating (differences that don’t reflect a substantial reinterpretation by the film of who Berlusconi is).  Though he isn’t tall (1.81m), Servillo is nowhere near as short as the real thing (1.65m); nor is he, even in the facial disguise worn here, apparently thuggish.

    It must be forty minutes or so into Loro when Berlusconi makes his first appearance.   Until then, the main character is Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio) – a thirty-something businessman in Taranto who traffics young female escorts and uses them, as bribes to local politicians, in order to obtain licences for business operations run by his father (Paolo Buglioni).  Ambitious to increase his income and power, Sergio is sure that his passport to these is Berlusconi.  He has a relationship, professional and sexual, with Tamara (Euridice Axen), an unscrupulous kindred spirit, and the pair head for Rome, with a view to making contact with ‘Him Him’ (as Sergio calls the great man).

    They make useful contacts in the capital but Sergio properly comes to his idol’s attention when he rents a villa in Sardinia, which he stocks with nubile escorts, close to Berlusconi’s summer residence.  Sergio is an obvious exemplar of the values of Berlusconi’s Italy and the early part of Loro is repetitive.  Even so, as a fictional creation, this character gives Sorrentino more room for manoeuvre and Riccardo Scamarcio’s blend of sly vitality and naïveté makes you almost root for Sergio.  You certainly want to see what happens once he succeeds in making contact with Berlusconi, even though the answer turns out to be, from Sergio’s point of view, not much at all.

    Sorrentino devotes most time to describing the notorious bunga-bunga parties and their personnel, and to exploring Berlusconi’s personal insecurities.  It’s been taken as read by some critics that, in repeatedly parading nearly naked young bodies, the talented director is a moral cut above the men in the story that assemble or enjoy the girls in question.  Although the DP Luca Bigazzi does construct some aesthetically remarkable images of groups of bodies, it’s not easy to perceive what Sorrentino is intending to show below the surface or how, as some admiring reviews of Loro have claimed, this ‘riot of decadence’ is ‘satirical’.

    A general election in 2006 sent Forza Italiano and its coalition partners into opposition.  Berlusconi’s exile from power throws into relief his unhappy marriage to Veronica Lario (Elena Sofia Ricci).  Sorrentino instances his weakness in other relationships too.  An opposition senator (Lorenzo Gioielli) whose support he means to buy tells Berlusconi that he despises him for his inferiority complex.   The remark visibly hits home – as do the words of a young actress (Anna Pagani) when, later in the film, she stops Berlusconi’s attempted seduction in its tracks by telling him his breath is like her grandfather’s – not bad, just ‘old’.  These moments stand out because the details aren’t what you expect.   In contrast, the dialogue in the climactic showdown between Silvio and Veronica is unsurprising, well though the exchange is acted.

    As in The Great Beauty, Sorrentino shows a knack for conjuring up regretful atmosphere when his camera moves away from frenetic hedonism, and participants in it, to people-less images – of Roman buildings in the earlier film, of land- and seascapes in Loro.  The effect – which echoes La dolce vita, on which The Great Beauty drew in several ways – is less potent this time, though, since the regret isn’t filtered through a personality as engaging as Toni Servillo’s Jep Gambardella (let alone Marcello Mastroianni’s Marcello).  Sorrentino doesn’t skewer Berlusconi as mercilessly as he might have done but he doesn’t, of course, admire him – an attitude that limits the impact of the film he’s made.  There’s one particular sequence in the closing stages that might be powerful if Sorrentino were more ambivalent about his central character and made the audience feel likewise.  In the grounds of his home in Sardinia, Berlusconi has a fake volcano.  He keeps telling his guests that he’ll show them it in action but he never does.  Alone now in the garden, he switches on the volcano and it sputters.  So does the sequence.

    Another element in the last part of Loro, though derivative in conception, is more striking.  In April 2009, a few months after Berlusconi became prime minister again, the southern Italian city of L’Aquila was hit by a major earthquake.  In the film, Berlusconi visits the homeless locals and promises them ‘a new town’ though we hear a woman’s voice call that ‘We want Jesus Christ back’.  She is referring to a statue that stood in a church destroyed in the earthquake (as well as suggesting that some parts of Italy haven’t been as irrevocably modernised as others).  Although he’s becoming increasingly politically isolated, Berlusconi delivers on his promise to the people of L’Aquila to build new houses for them.  This is upstaged by the recovery of the statue, hoisted by firemen from the ruins of the church before being lowered carefully to the ground.  The image inevitably evokes the prologue to La dolce vita, in which a helicopter transports a statue of Christ over an ancient Roman viaduct but Sorrentino then focuses on the faces of the firemen, tired by their efforts, and continues to do so through most of the closing credits.  This compassionate fascination with people comes out of nowhere and the tonal change is arresting.  It sent me out of the cinema feeling differently from when I went in.  In spite of everything that’s wrong with Loro, its very last gasp made me curious to see what Paolo Sorrentino does next.

    6 May 2019

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