TV review

  • Spy! – John Vassall (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Ben Rea (1980)

    The subject of the first play in Spy![1] had none of the glamour of Britain’s best-known moles of recent months, the real-life Anthony Blunt and the fictional Bill Haydon.  John Vassall was set in 1950s Moscow – drab, silent, freezing in the Cold War.  This was worlds away from the psychophysical labyrinth of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (never mind the church spires and choral nunc dimittis in the closing titles sequence that John Irvin used as an ironic counterpoint to ‘The Circus’).  Ruth Carter’s script for John Vassall even implied that the title character (John Normington), a junior member of staff at the British Embassy in Moscow, might have got his posting there simply because, as a single man, he required less accommodation.   There was a promising dramatic irony here:  in the event, Vassall’s increasing feelings of isolation were what tempted him into the city’s homosexual underground.  This triggered the threats of blackmail that supposedly led to his working as a Soviet spy.  Yet the play’s description of Vassall’s messy life in Moscow didn’t develop and the ‘dramatised reconstruction’ gradually withered into an illustrated documentary.  There was more and more information in the soundtrack narrative but little penetration of character – all the way up to Vassall’s arrest and imprisonment on spying charges the best part of a decade later, in 1962.  He received an eighteen-year prison sentence and served ten years in three different British prisons.  The relative harshness of his sentence won’t be lost on a post-‘Fourth Man’ audience but John Vassall can hardly claim credit for that impact[2].

    The early stages of the play, directed by Ben Rea, were the best.  Vassall was established as a man of, as he later admitted, limited intelligence and larger social pretension, initially treating his term in Moscow as ‘an adventure’ – with the enthusiasm of a tourist and a social climber, without much sense of responsibility towards his seemingly tedious Embassy work.  The unobtrusive editing sometimes reinforced the contrast between consecutive scenes by not emphasising a break between them and the story moved fluently towards the seduction of Vassall.  It was during this pivotal ‘honeytrap’ episode that I started having doubts about the play.  From a purely practical point of view:  why were there so many seducers?   It must have been hard to get incriminating photographs of Vassall under all the competing flesh.  And how did Vassall react to the seduction?  The polite lack of responsiveness that Mavis Nicholson noted in her interview with him for this week’s Radio Times was mirrored in the play, where it seemed a more glaring omission.  Ruth Carter’s piece changed from a character study into a case history – a cruel fate for the protagonist who, we were told more than once at the start, valued his individuality.  Carter’s script eventually suggested made a crude link between Vassall’s behaviour and a mother obsession that explained his homosexuality etc etc.  It’s worth noting that Vassall points out in the Radio Times interview that the letters he wrote home, all addressed solely to his mother according to the play, were written to both his parents.

    John Normington was expected to blend the few character traits the script supplied – hints of the cultural poseur and the social climber, a whiff of irresponsibility – with a few camp gestures and expressions, then keep repeating the mixture he came up with.  He had to do this virtually in a vacuum, since Vassall was rarely engaged in action or conversation.  It was a thankless task but Normington held on to the character tenaciously.  He was especially good at creating physically contrasting impressions – of dapper self-approval one moment, flabby helplessness the next.  He managed to convey the brittleness of a man who was lacking in support of any kind.  But Vassall’s role was so predominantly passive and reluctant there was only so much Normington could do.  The more active agents – those who manipulated Vassall – were Sinister Foreigners with either a poker face or a maniacal laugh (John Abineri, in the former category, was the best of these).

    For those sick of television espionage the arrival of Spy! on our screens might seem a crushing blow.  Allan Prior conceived the series shortly before Tinker Tailor had turned Britain into a nation of mole-hunters, and the Fourth Man affair hit the headlines.  But the BBC will need more lively material than John Vassall for Spy! to be a hit.  The inherent limitation of ‘faction’ – that the audience may well know the ending – was virtually acknowledged by Ruth Carter, who made no attempt to dramatise events once Vassall had begun to be blackmailed by the Russians.  (The protagonist even stopped writing the letters home that told us something about himself.)  There was nothing about KGB methods of interrogation or what kind of information Vassall was passing to the Soviet Union; nothing either about his sexual habits before or after his time in Moscow.    It was as if the script had been put together entirely from looking at old newspaper cuttings.  This was tough on John Normington and tough too on John Vassall, who ‘now lives alone, under an assumed name’.  Vassall lives to see his real name and his treachery dragged through the mud in a drama series with a finger-pointing title.  It’s adding insult to injury that the recreation of his story doesn’t bring him to life as the individual he was supposedly proud to be.

    [January 1980]

    [1]  Afternote:  The BBC series Spy!, broadcast in early 1980, comprised six single plays, each based on a true story from what IMDB calls ‘the murky world of twentieth-century espionage’.

    [2]  Afternote:  Sir Anthony Blunt was named in November 1979 as the ‘Fourth Man’ in the Cambridge spy ring.  Blunt had confessed to being a Soviet spy back in 1964 after being offered immunity from prosecution.

  • Face to Face (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Ansikte mot ansikte

    Ingmar Bergman (1976)

    Cries and Whispers (1972) was the last famous Bergman work to appear exclusively in cinemas.  Over the next decade or so, his four best-known pieces – Scenes from a Marriage (1973), The Magic Flute (1975), Face to Face (1976) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) – were all made either for television or in dual film and TV versions.  Face to Face, released in cinemas in April 1976 as a two-hour feature, was shown on Swedish television in May and June of the same year as a four-part mini-series, running just under three hours in total.  It was this version that BFI screened in their current Bergman retrospective.  Both the film and the television series cover a short period but a major crisis in the life of Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullmann), a psychiatrist at a Stockholm hospital.  Her husband, also a psychiatrist, is attending conferences in America; their daughter and only child is away at summer camp.  The family is soon to move to a new house, which is not yet ready.  In the meantime, Jenny goes to stay with her grandmother (Aino Taube) and ailing grandfather (Gunnar Björnstrand) in their apartment on Strandvägen.  Her professional responsibilities are greater than ever – she’s currently deputising for the absent chief psychiatrist – but it’s soon clear that Jenny’s own mental health is precarious.

    In the first shot of the first scene of the first episode (‘The Separation’), Liv Ullmann looks into the camera; her face is that of a woman who sees the void.  The camera pulls back to reveal a room in the house that Jenny’s family is about to vacate – empty but for a plant and a telephone on the floor.  Jenny bends down to make a phone call to her grandmother, to confirm her arrival later in the day, and instantly switches into bright sociability.  At work, she retains a cheerful mask virtually throughout an interview with a demented patient:  disturbed as she is, Maria (Kari Sylwan) sees through the mask but, except when she’s briefly violent towards Jenny, fails to dislodge it.  Her grandparents’ home is close to a church whose bells ring as Jenny enters the apartment building.  An elderly, veiled woman in black comes down the stairs and acknowledges her.  Jenny is immediately disconcerted but reverts to determined cheerfulness when her grandmother opens the front door.

    The remainder of this episode and the second one (‘The Border’) build up a picture of Jenny’s troubled mind and unhappy marriage – chiefly through her dreams and visions, and her conversations with Tomas Jacobi (Erland Josephson).  She first meets Tomas, a gynaecologist, at a party; they subsequently go out for dinner and back to his house.  When she returns to her grandparents’ apartment that night, Jenny watches unseen as her grandfather, wandering about the place in his nightshirt, becomes terrified that the clocks in the apartment are telling the wrong time, and her grandmother comforts him.  Jenny then receives a phone call that sends her hurrying to the family home she’s recently left.  There, she finds Maria lying unconscious and is confronted by two men (Birger Malmsten and Göran Stangertz), the younger of whom tries to rape Jenny.   Shortly afterwards, she and Tomas attend a piano recital together; again, she accompanies him back home.  Lying in bed beside him, Jenny quietly describes to Tomas the attempted assault on her.  She then suffers rapidly consecutive panic attacks (impressively realised by Liv Ullmann). Next day, back at her grandparents, she sleeps continuously for many hours.  She’s woken by her grandmother, who’s about to leave for a short trip away with her husband.  Jenny insists she’ll be fine on her own.  She gets up, showers and dresses.  In the empty apartment, she records a message for her husband – an oral suicide note.

    As she makes this recording, there’s a striking convergence between Jenny’s calmness and clarity and the narrative mood of Face to Face.  Just as Jenny’s long sleep seems to have soothed her nerves and cleared her mind, Bergman now feels able to jettison the Freudian paraphernalia of nightmares and flashbacks to childhood trauma, the knelling bells, the ticking clocks.  Jenny addresses her husband in a voice mildly affectionate and apologetic but quietly purposeful too.  She describes her life as ‘a process of suffocation’; the widening gap between her ‘external behaviour and internal impoverishment’; the ‘vast sense of dread’ that alone remains.  The ringing telephone that ends the second episode sounds like a summons back to life but isn’t.  The next episode (‘The Twilight Land’) starts with her sealing the envelope containing the cassette recording and resuming her suicide preparations.  Liv Ullmann’s movement expresses the fine line between Jenny’s single-mindedness and apprehension – the latter isn’t fear so much as awareness of the momentousness of what she’s about to do.  She sits on her bed, taking handfuls of Nembutal, washing each helping down with water until she’s emptied the bottle of tablets.  She lies down on the bed.  Her fingers move up and down the patterned wallpaper as she loses consciousness.  Though the image isn’t especially original, it evokes, for Bergman followers, the wallpaper in Through a Glass Darkly (with which, of course, Face to Face is also connected by title).

    The Nembutals obviously – one’s tempted to say unfortunately, as far as the rest of this third part is concerned – don’t signal the end of Jenny or of Face to Face.  The unanswered call came from Tomas; concerned that Jenny had suddenly broken off their previous phone conversation and now wasn’t picking up, he came round to the apartment and (don’t ask how exactly) got her to hospital just in time.   As she drifts in and out of consciousness, Jenny, clad in scarlet, moves through a dream world that is less than startling:  ’The Twilight Land’ proves to be over-familiar Bergman terrain, full of just the kind of imagery he seemed to have sloughed off when Jenny made her tape-recording.  A shot of dark waters accompanies the start of the opening credits of each episode of Face to Face; this, on its own, is more powerfully suggestive than most of the oneiric stuff that follows.  Though there are strong moments in the fourth and last part (‘The Return’), nothing emulates, in terms of visual and verbal drama, the prelude to and execution of the suicide attempt.

    It was almost a relief to read in Images: My Life in Film that Bergman regarded the piece, or at least its second half, as a failure.  He intended:

    ‘… a film about dreams and reality.  The dreams were to become tangible reality.  Reality would dissolve and become dream.  I have occasionally managed to move unhindered between dream and reality:  Wild Strawberries, Persona, The Silence, Cries and Whispers.  This time it was more difficult.  … The dream sequences became synthetic, the reality blurred.’

    As usual, Bergman is hard on himself.  There are passages in Face to Face where the distinction between dream and reality is virtually imperceptible – for example, between Jenny’s grandfather’s semi-sleepwalking preoccupation with time and the following sequence in the empty house.  (I was never sure whether Jenny imagined the attempted rape and whether her hysterical panic in Tomas’s bed was a reaction solely to the assault or signalled a larger mental disintegration.)  Bergman’s self-criticism is essentially right, though – so too his comment that Liv Ullmann’s ‘strength and talent held the film together’.  He must have realised he was unable to achieve the effect he was after not just in retrospect but while he was making Face to Face.   The momentum of the piece is increasingly to do with Ullmann’s acting – the performer, rather than the character she’s playing, becomes the focus of attention.  Bergman seems impelled principally by the exciting uncertainty of how much he can keep asking of his lead and whether she can keep delivering.  She can and she does:  it’s a magnificent performance (an Oscar-nominated one that should have been Oscar-winning:  the Best Actress award that year went instead to Faye Dunaway in Network!).

    Tomas Jacobi’s role in the story doesn’t make complete sense.  His medical specialty may be meant to have a quasi-symbolic meaning (as with, in a more light-hearted vein, Gunnar Björnstrand’s gynaecologist in A Lesson in Love) – but it’s not clear why, once Jenny is recovering in hospital, Tomas should be the doctor in charge of her.   Erland Josephson is very good, though, especially at listening to Jenny and when, in a surprising monologue, Tomas tells her about his love for one of the young men at the party where he and Jenny first met.   The weaker ‘reality’ sequences in the third and fourth episodes include Jenny’s encounters with her husband Erik (Sven Lindberg) and daughter Anna (Helene Friberg).  Erik, who briefly interrupts his American tour to visit Jenny in hospital, seems merely dull:  one expects a marriage in a Bergman film to have failed for more dramatic reasons.  Helene Friberg is the same girl to whom Bergman’s camera devoted too much attention in the theatre audience of The Magic Flute.  Friberg’s face in that film didn’t reveal as much as Bergman must have seen in it:  in Face to Face, she’s required to act too and the result is worse.  Friberg has a look but it’s mostly the same look; she also anticipates the dejection and hostility which Jenny’s words are meant to induce in Anna.

    In his 1972 book Ingmar Bergman Directs, John Simon quotes Bergman as follows:

    ‘I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being.   It’s a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.’

    There are more than a few characters in Bergman films whose ‘dignity or wholeness’ is so deeply hidden that it might as well not be there.  One of the most appealing things about Face to Face is that, although this is far from the dream-reality scheme he says he had in mind, Bergman comes closer than usual to substantiating his humanist creed – thanks to his writing and to what some of his actors make of it.  Jenny talks at one point about children who, frightened of the dark, don’t cry out – for fear that, if they do and no one replies, it will make matters worse.  It follows that her suicide attempt is not a cry for help but the need for another human voice emerges in a lower-key request, when Tomas first comes to see her in hospital.  She asks him to talk – about, say, a film he’s seen or a piece of music he’s heard; some kind of anecdote that will engage Jenny and confirm her in the land of the living.  This chimes with Tomas’s later summary of what he describes as, ‘for us non-believers’, an incantation: ‘I wish that someone or something would affect me so that I can become real’.

    Discharged from hospital, Jenny soon returns to work.  (In what’s an odd postscript to a piece about a fictional character, a closing legend explains that she subsequently divorced and went to America to do research.)  Before she resumes her professional life, she witnesses a scene in her grandparents’ bedroom that is the culmination of the benign, humanist aspect of Face to Face.  Her grandfather has taken a turn for the worse and lies on what her grandmother fears will be his deathbed.   As she watches the old couple – the wife sitting on the bed, holding her husband’s hand – Jenny sees ‘for a moment that love embraces everything, even death’.  Her voiceover jars (it’s not been heard hitherto) and Jenny withdraws quickly:  both she and Bergman are prudent enough not to linger, in case the epiphany – and the viewer’s belief in it – can’t be sustained.   While it lasts, though, this scene is marvellous.  Although Gunnar Björnstrand wasn’t himself in good health by the time Face to Face was made, it hardly impairs his acting.  While the camera’s on him, Björnstrand’s look and attitude validate Jenny’s and Bergman’s wishful thinking.

    24 February 2018

Posts navigation