Beröringen

Ingmar Bergman (1971)

The Touch was made when Bergman was at the height of his powers and reputation yet no print of the bilingual (Swedish and English) version had survived until the Swedish Film Institute, making use of a print in Bergman’s personal collection, restored the film in 2008 (the year after his death).  The picture was a Swedish-US co-production and the American partner, ABC Pictures (who produced Cabaret the following year), released an English-only version.   The Touch is essentially a three-hander:  a Swedish married couple and the American man with whom the wife has an affair.  As Clyde Jeavons pointed out in his introduction at the BFI, this meant that – absurdly – scenes featuring only the Swedish characters were conducted in English in the version of the film seen outside Europe (and, for all I know, seen in all parts of Europe except Sweden).  The restored mixed language print had its first public outing at the Bergman week on ‘his’ island of Faro.  This showing, as part of the London Film Festival, was only its second.  It’s shocking that the proper version of a Bergman film from 1971 could have disappeared and wonderful that it’s been brought back.

The first sequence of The Touch is wonderful too.  Karin Vergerus (Bibi Andersson) arrives at a hospital, to learn from nurses that her mother has just died ‘peacefully’.  Karin goes to sit with the body.  Although her sadness and affection for her mother are evident enough, Karin’s emotions seem frozen, in suspense.  She kisses her mother, caresses her hair, takes her hand – there are rings on the wedding finger.  But the daughter seems almost intrigued by the process – mesmerised by the deadness of the figure in the bed, by the corpse’s absolute distance from the woman she loved.  The staff ask Karin about removing her mother’s effects.  She says that she’ll see to this the next day but is asked to take the rings immediately.  When, alone in a waiting room, Karin holds the rings in her own hand, she breaks down.  It’s as if once they’ve been detached from the dead woman, the rings can properly evoke the living one and her absence.  As she cries, Karin covers her face with her left hand; we see her own rings and realise that one day she will be separated from them in the same way.  (Whenever we see her hand later in the film, the memory of this opening scene returns – Karin is always a dying woman, as well as a married one.)   There are church bells outside and Bergman not only makes a death knell of their chimes but gives the marriage of image and sound the texture of memory:  even in the moment that it’s happening, you know that Karin will always remember the ringing.  (The recurrence of the bells isn’t, however, as richly evocative as the subsequent shots of the ringed hand.)

In the hospital waiting room, Karin meets David Kovac (Elliott Gould).  When he turns on the light, she asks him to turn it off.   By the end of the opening titles sequence, which follows this prologue, David is walking in a garden with Karin.  It turns out he’s visiting the home of her and her surgeon husband Andreas (Max von Sydow) – and that the visit came about through the two men, rather than Karin and David, knowing each other:  Andreas had treated David in hospital after the latter’s suicide attempt.   Not much later, David and Karin are having a secret affair and, from this point onwards, The Touch starts to go wrong.  A main cause of this is Elliott Gould.  Why did Bergman cast him as David?  At the time, Gould was a very new star, one who’d made a mark in highly intelligent comedies (Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, M*A*S*H) but without a major non-comic role to his name.   (Approaching forty years later, that situation hasn’t changed, as far as I know, although Gould was good in The Long Goodbye.)

David is an archaeologist:  Gould wears glasses and (in the first part of the film) a beard for academic credibility.  His swarthy hirsuteness and big features certainly work as a contrast with Max von Sydow in the role of the complacent, condescending husband (the surname Vergerus, often used by Bergman, usually denotes a small-minded rationalist).   David’s unpredictability seems meant to be part of his appeal but his peremptory childishness makes him both unpleasant and uninteresting and this, combined with Gould’s poor performance, has unfortunate consequences.   I found myself (a) getting less interested in Karin because her infatuation with David made me feel she was less interesting  than I’d first thought and (b) thinking she must be mad not to want to stay married to Max von Sydow because he was so much better an actor than the one she was having an affair with.  There’s a good deal more unresolved tension – more sensual strength – in the one scene in which Karin and Andreas get close to having sex than in any of her several supposedly passionate couplings with David.

It’s not surprising that Elliott Gould was bowled over by being asked to appear in a Bergman film but he seems paralysed by the honour.  He speaks his lines stiffly and cautiously – as if frightened of breaking them:  Gould sounds to be speaking in a foreign language to a much greater extent than either of his co-stars.   The brief switches into English in Autumn Sonata made me think that Bergman didn’t have a great ear for its rhythms and he evidently couldn’t hear how wooden Gould’s line readings were here.  David’s nationality gets to be a problem in other ways too.  Because Americans occur so rarely in Bergman films, you can’t help seeing this character as the embodiment of what the director sees as national traits – and David is not just crassly volatile but occasionally violent in his treatment of Karin.  Towards the end of the film, when David has deserted her, Karin follows him to London and calls at his address there.  He’s out but she meets his sister (Sheila Reid), who explains, in an English accent, that the siblings ‘have everything in common’ – and you think ‘everything except a nationality’. By this point, I wondered if Bergman had wanted David to be British – but needed to use an American star because of the financing of The Touch.  (Perhaps too the national stereotyping on which the character of David seems based might have dictated that a Briton was too spiritually akin to the supposedly cold fish Swedish husband.)

The magnificent prologue isn’t the only thing to admire in The Touch.  Some of the strong points are simply effective – a relentlessly inane melody playing on the radio, as Karin does domestic chores, underlines what her married life largely consists of.   The domestic routine of the Vergerus family (there are two children) is uncomfortably poised between security and tedium:  the way in which Andreas repeatedly calls an end to the evening by taking the dog for a walk rings very true.  Other details are more characteristic of Bergman.  The wood-boring insects eating away from the inside an ancient carving of the Virgin Mary, which has been disinterred on David’s archaeological dig, may seem an obvious correlate to the corroding development of his relationship with Karin but the image is peculiarly upsetting.   The scene between Karin and David’s sister in London has an odd, powerfully impacted quality.  And there are slighter verbal details that resonate:  arriving at David’s apartment and interrupting his lovemaking with Karin, Andreas asks him to turn a light on and the request reverses the one Karin makes of David when they first meet at the hospital.

Bibi Andersson creates a strong impression of a woman who, for all her likeable qualities, is essentially dissimulating.   Andersson’s acting when Karin finds that David has left his apartment is amazing:  Karin seems to want to yell but her natural tendency to suppress gets in the way of her giving full-voiced expression to her anguish.  She gives queer aborted moans and finds it harder and harder to breathe.  Max von Sydow does wonders with the clichéd and narrowly written role of the ‘clinical’ surgeon.   When Karin comes to his office to tell him she’s going to follow David to London, Andreas’s professional manner is withering.  Von Sydow gives you the sense that Andreas is aware of his coldness and that, even if it’s an essential part of his nature, he also knows how to make spiteful, hurtful use of it.

Yet the screenplay isn’t impressive as a whole – either in terms of plot or in crucial passages of dialogue.   When Karin refuses to give up David, Andreas tells her she needn’t bother coming back home if things don’t work out.   After the scene in London, we see her back at home – heavily pregnant, sleeping in a separate room from Andreas.  Why has he agreed to have her back?  It seems odds against the baby’s being his.  In any case, how could this proudly self-centred man bear to have his wife return home and hear tongues wagging in what (we’re told repeatedly) is a small town where people can’t easily have secrets?  (If Bergman included a scene that explained Andreas’s change of heart or demonstrated his attitude towards Karin once she’s come back, you might be convinced; but we don’t see Andreas again from the point at which he dismisses Karin at his office and the omission seems to be an admission of failure.)

Bergman doesn’t do much to persuade us either that Karin would be able to keep her affair concealed – and, in particular, explain her sudden departures from home to Andreas’s satisfaction – for so long.  As in Scenes from a Marriage, much of what the characters say to each other is melodramatically conventional.  As in Autumn Sonata, key monologues (like Karin’s clear-eyed appraisal of David and his angry tirade at their final meeting) come over less as the speaker’s personal, inevitably biased point of view than as Bergman’s bald explanation of the character on the receiving end of the home truths.  It’s often occurred to me that an English-speaking audience is willing to swallow lines that appear on the screen in translation which, if they were spoken in English, we would find ridiculous.  The bilingual script of The Touch in effect provides a case study of this phenomenon.  It’s not all the fault of Elliott Gould that you feel like laughing at much of what he says, while Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow are largely protected by the subtitles.

19 October 2009