Skepp till Indialand

Ingmar Bergman (1947)

The title doesn’t sound like Bergman, whose films rarely travel far from his homeland.  Nor does Erland von Koch’s score – richly orchestrated, vaguely exotic – sound like Bergman music.  Once the story is underway, though, things don’t seem outlandish at all.  A decade later in the Bergman oeuvre, The Seventh Seal’s protagonist would return to plague-ravaged Sweden after fighting in the Crusades; in this earlier film, ship’s officer Johannes Blom (Birger Malmsten) is back on shore leave in the port town where he lived before setting sail abroad seven years ago.  He must, according to his voiceover, try to make sense of the events that led up to his departure:  he’s preoccupied, in other words, with where he came from rather than where he’s going next.  The single extended flashback that comprises the bulk of the film explores Johannes’s troubled relationship with his father, the brutally abusive Captain Blom (Holger Löwenadler).  His captaincy seems to be a self-bestowed badge of authority:  he’s no more than the choleric boss of a small crew, which includes Johannes, operating from a salvage vessel in the harbour.  The room Blom senior rents secretly in the town centre is full of pictures and what appear to be souvenirs of foreign lands.  But he’s never been to these places.

A Ship Bound for India was the third film directed by Bergman, after Crisis and It Rains on Our Love.  As with its two predecessors (but unlike most of its successors), his screenplay was adapted from someone else’s play, in this case Martin Söderhjelm’s.  Whether it’s a legacy of the original stage work or Bergman’s invention, the result is wordy and the set-up heavy on blatant symbolism.  Each of the main characters delivers at least one hefty, self-revealing speech.  Johannes, in the flashback, is obsessed with a hump on his back.  In the present, when he tells a former acquaintance this has nearly disappeared, she even replies, ‘It wasn’t your back that was deformed but your soul’.  Blom, in the autumn of a frustrated, benighted life, plies a trade salvaging goods from shipwrecks.  He’s losing his sight into the bargain.

Johannes has another purpose in returning home:  he means to find Sally, the girl he left behind there.  Almost as soon as he’s set foot in the town, he mistakenly thinks he’s seen her and calls her name.  Soon afterwards, he discovers that Sally (Gertrud Fridh) is renting a room in the boarding house run by Sofi (Hjördis Petterson) and Selma (Naemi Briese), who’ve known Johannes since he was a boy.  In the flashback, we first meet Sally as a chanteuse in a grotty vaudeville theatre on the harbour.  She’s so anxious to escape it that she becomes big-talking Captain Blom’s mistress.  The inherent antagonism between Blom and his son moves to another level when Sally becomes romantically involved with Johannes.  His considerate affection shows her the possibility of an authentically better life.

Bergman may have been particularly interested in the father-son conflict in Söderhjelm’s play (a conflict close to Bergman’s own heart).   At any rate, this aspect of A Ship Bound for India is more satisfying than the plotting of the Johannes-Sally strand.  The men’s rivalry builds to a melodramatic but nonetheless powerful climax.  While Johannes is underwater, inspecting a submerged vessel for salvage, the captain cuts the air supply to his son’s diving suit and throws his lifeline overboard.  Others rescue Johannes just in time; Blom, despite his failing eyesight, flees the scene and holes up in his room in the town, where he furiously destroys his ‘memorabilia’ of places  he knows he’ll now never see.  The room is on an upper floor.  With no other means of escape and fearing arrest when Johannes and others break in, he jumps from the window.  This is the last seen of Blom although the fall isn’t fatal.  (He dies at some point during Johannes’s absence overseas.)

Beside this, Sally’s reluctant return to music hall and Johannes’s swift shipboard departure for foreign parts, after a last night of love with Sally, seem under-motivated.  It isn’t clear whether he writes to her while he’s away, and if not why not.  These things seem to happen (or not happen) simply in order for Johannes to return to rescue Sally for good – which he’s able to do once he’s come to terms with the events of seven years ago.  (Coming to terms with appears to mean no more than remembering.)  The film ends with Johannes and Sally boarding his ship – an image of togetherness with more emotional charge than credibility.  Much less emotional charge, though, than the sequence during the flashback when the couple spend time in a deserted windmill, where their feelings for each other are expressed for the first time.

There are fine things in the film, even so.  Shot in black and white by Göran Strindberg (DP on several early Bergmans), A Ship Bound for India is visually rich.  The settings and camera movement often express the characters’ psychic states.  The confined spaces of the salvage vessel and Blom’s lair are juxtaposed with images of open water – an obvious but effective illustration of the principals’ claustrophobic lives and longing for freedom.  At the same time, the wharves and boat equipment are photographed in ways that bring the locale to realistic life.  The sequences in the variety theatre have a tacky, ominous energy.  With his plastered-down hair, sweaty look and a manner both harassed and hustling, Åke Fridell’s theatre owner is the soul of the place.

The acting is strong throughout.  Four years later in Summer Interlude, Birger Malmsten passed for a boy of twenty.  Here, as the older Johannes, Malmsten is careworn enough to seem more than his actual age of twenty-six.  Holger Löwenadler is especially good in his opening scene, when Blom is browbeating the Russian sailor who retaliates physically in the variety theatre.  Gertrud Fridh makes Sally’s persisting misery deeply felt.  In Alice’s big speech, Anna Lindahl does likewise with her character’s weariness.  Hjördis Petterson and Naemi Briese are a persuasive double act as Sofi and Selma.  Their veneer of sociability, welcoming Johannes almost as a returning hero, soon gives way to avid spite as they eavesdrop on his anguished conversation with the despairing Sally.

25 August 2020