Valborgsmässoafton
Gustaf Edgren (1935)
The film is being shown at the BFI as part of the Ingrid Bergman season, which includes pictures she made in Sweden before emigrating to Hollywood. The basic structure and imperatives of the story are formulaic – true love is tested and the lovers separated, eventually the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. There are some absurdities, particularly in propelling the story to its happy ending, as the romantic lead simply extricates himself from the foreign legion that he’s joined, returns home to hand himself in – then emerges from the police station in the next shot with everything sorted out. In most respects though, the film seems intelligently fresh. It begins in the office of a local newspaper, the Morning Post – with a debate among the editor and his colleagues about the reasons behind and the implications of the falling Swedish birth rate. This introduces the story of Lena (Bergman), the daughter of Fredrik Bergström, the senior journalist on the paper. A spinster (and expected to devote herself as necessary to keeping house for her father), she gives up her job as the secretary of Johan Borg, a successful businessman, because her unspoken and, as far as she can tell, unrequited love for him is proving too painful. It turns out the love is requited: Borg’s own marriage to the cold but promiscuous Clary has become increasingly unhappy because of her refusal to start a family. The plot involves Clary’s need for an abortion, an attempt at blackmail as a result of this, and the consequences of an incident in which the blackmailer is shot dead. (The gun is fired by Clary, in a virtual act of self-defence on behalf of her husband, but in a way that appears to incriminate Borg himself.)
Gustaf Edgren moves from one scene to another unemphatically. In the first part of the film, this tends to make the story seem dramatically underpowered. The fact that it was (I assume) not yet technically possible to make instant editing transitions between scenes gives the film a slightly disjointed quality. But Edgren’s unassertive style begins to pay dividends: it leaves you wanting more, sometimes makes you realise – after the scene is over – that something dramatically or emotionally significant has occurred without its being crudely stressed. The acting is very well orchestrated. I enjoyed the essentially (but not reductively) comical flavour and playing of Bergström’s colleagues at the newspaper, especially the editor Gustav Palm (Erik Berglund), who has a look of G K Chesterton – and an especially good moment when he confesses to being a covert milk-drinker in the office. Palm has kept this secret by putting the milk into a professionally acceptable beer bottle. The rotten wife (Karin Kavli) and the blackmailer (George Rydeberg) are played in a more conventional melodramatic style but Lars Hanson as Borg is interestingly impersonal and opaque in the early stages – it’s not easy either to understand Lena’s passion for Borg or to read his motives. And the pairing of Ingrid Bergman and Victor Sjöström is fascinating. There’s a scene in which daughter and father face off that seems a much larger moment – at this distance in time a watershed in Swedish cinema: the incipient international screen star confronts the illustrious director of silent films. You can see in Bergman’s acting here the qualities that made her so distinctive in 1940s Hollywood – the combination of propriety and sensuality, the ability to radiate a character’s feelings as if from within rather than through histrionic detail. Sjöström brings a fine blend of theatricality and naturalism to the role of Bergström. He creates a fully convincing portrait of a socially responsible and intelligent man whose professional success increases his impregnability as a respected patriarch but who is a benign tyrant in his relationship with his daughter.
The BFI note comprises brief extracts from Swedish and New York reviews of Walpurgis Night at the time of its release (the former are highly enthusiastic, the latter patronising – and shocked at the abortion theme), along with an ‘NFT programme note’ by David Shipman. Shipman says that ‘This film attempts a seriousness it doesn’t afterwards maintain by starting with a discussion as to whether crowded housing conditions is [sic] the reason for the low birth-rate’. I think the screenplay, by Edgren and Oscar Rydqvist, is thematically more consistent and dramatically more sophisticated than this suggests. The film seemed to me pro-children – and to express that view in a range of ways: in the opening discussion (where Bergström, who deplores the falling birth rate, commands a respect that his callow colleagues don’t); in the family gathering for Bergström’s sixtieth birthday (and the song sung there by his grandchildren); in the morbid consequences attaching to the abortion; in the lesson learned by Bergström that he needs to let his daughter live her life and by his fellow workers at the Morning Post that they should get on with procreating; in Palm’s conversion from alcohol to milk; in the fact that Walpurgis night in Sweden marks the advent of spring, the start of new life. Some of Edgren’s and Rydqvist’s illustrations of their theme may be questionable now but the variety of these is admirable and they steer as clear as possible of sentimentality. Apart from its considerable historical interest, Walpurgis Night is greatly entertaining and emotionally satisfying.
8 January 2009
