Nära livet[1]
Ingmar Bergman (1958)
The setting is a hospital maternity ward – to be specific, a ward for pregnant women rather than new mothers and their babies. So Close to Life inspired a work of art in Sylvia Plath’s 1962 work ‘Three Women’, a long poem or short play for voices[2], but the film is far from vintage Bergman. Perhaps he needed a break when he made it: So Close to Life appeared just three months after the end of 1957, the annus mirabilis that saw the release of both The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. But the fundamental problem is the screenplay, written by Ulla Isaksson. So Close to Life is based on two of her short stories, which Bergman admired, and Isaksson went on to write The Virgin Spring (1960) but this script is schematic and the director doesn’t find hidden depths in the conventional turn of events.
The focus is on three patients. Cecilia Ellius (Ingrid Thulin), brought in via accident and emergency, has miscarried and is kept on the ward to recover from her subsequent D&C. Hjördis Petterson (Bibi Andersson) is unmarried and alone; estranged from her parents and dreading the responsibility of a baby, she means to have hers adopted. The heavily pregnant Stina Andersson (Eva Dahlbeck) glows and bubbles in anticipation of the birth of her first child. In the course of the film, each woman experiences a profound change of outlook. All the main actresses are strong (the sound of Dahlbeck’s cries in the simulation of Stina’s contractions is remarkable). They’re well supported by Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, the carefully sensitive head nurse who’s seen it all before. But the patients’ reversals of fortune are obviously melodramatic. Stina’s baby is stillborn; her love of life vanishes; her tragedy makes the other two women think again. The anguished Cecilia believed she miscarried because her marriage was unhappy – because neither she nor her husband (Erland Josephson) really wanted the baby. By the end of the film, she’s calmer, more accepting, perhaps ready to try again to make the marriage work. Hjördis is shocked into feeling guilty about not wanting her child. A phone call home quickly establishes that her mother will be happy, after all, to welcome her daughter and grandchild with open arms.
There are some good things. Stina’s husband (Max von Sydow), who visits her just before she goes into labour, exudes a winning mix of love for his wife and self-involvement: he clears the plate of Stina’s evening meal. The frosted glass in the hospital doors that open to admit Cecilia at the start and close on Hjördis as she exits at the end are a novel form of stage curtains. The black-and-white cinematography by Max Wilén is effective (it’s not hard to see the influence of this on Sylvia Plath’s imagery) although some of the close-ups reveal (as Bergman acknowledges in Images: My Life in Film) too much make-up – on Eva Dahlbeck’s face especially. There are bizarre things too. Cecilia receives a visit from her sister-in-law Greta (Inga Landgré), whose steely gaze and black costume rather suggest Death in The Seventh Seal – it’s surprising that Greta’s words perk Cecilia up. In a brief interlude in the maternity ward proper, the shots of newborns being taken out of what look like desk drawers are extraordinary. A quick flash of an exposed breast is, however, daft: it’s as if Bergman is daring the censor to remove it. When Stina reflects on the loss of her child, her inability to make sense of the fact that a life that was there has disappeared – how, where? – exactly reiterates the musing of the heroine who loses her baby in It Rains on Our Love, more than a decade earlier. Stina’s desolation is more convincing than the hopeful progress made by Cecilia and Hjördis. This, unfortunately, is ammunition for those who loathe Bergman as a doom merchant and can say that he drains nearly all the joyful potential of the subject and setting from So Close to Life.
20 February 2018
[1] The Swedish translates literally as ‘Close to Life’. The film was released in the US as Brink of Life.
[2] According to Ted Hughes’s editor’s notes in Plath’s Collected Poems, ‘This piece was written for radio at the invitation of Douglas Cleverdon, who produced it to great effect on the BBC’s Third Programme, on 19 August 1962.’ Hughes’s notes don’t acknowledge the Bergman film’s influence on the piece.
