Ingmar Bergman

(On Cable TV, September 2021) I know, I know: “An Ingmar Bergman romantic comedy” is not exactly a string of words that go well together. It feels strange to contemplate and even stranger to type. But that’s Smiles of a Summer Night — not merely a comedy, but an influential one as well, as its complex criss-crossing of lust and love inspired later filmmakers to do better. The opening has a quasi-Lubitschian quality in how it describes married people contemplating affairs past and current, a two-year marriage left unconsummated, and an eight-point graph of people lusting after one another. After an urban-set first half that sets up the tensions, the action moves to a vast rural domain where the passions all play out against the backdrop of the year’s shortest nights. From Lubitsch to Shakespeare, the romantic entanglements get untangled in time for a happy conclusion. I’m maybe halfway through the Bergman filmography, but Smiles of a Summer Night is definitely atypical — although this should not be interpreted as a change in Berman’s typically heavy direction: his style remains slow, ponderous and energy-free: you have to pay attention to figure out that it’s a comedy (anyone merely passing by would assume it’s just one more of his drama) and it’s a given that a lighter-touched director would have been a better fit for the material. Still, it’s nice to have a Bergman that doesn’t necessarily revel in impenetrable doom and gloom, so there’s at least that. I can certainly understand why it’s been remade a few times since then: plenty of directors can picture themselves doing more comedic justice to the base material. But, hey: “An Ingmar Bergman romantic comedy.”  You get what you get.

(Criterion Streaming, December 2019) There’s something almost hilariously weird in that Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a European art-house classic, has a plot similar to grindhouse nasty The Last House of the Left. In both cases, we have a daughter getting raped and killed by hooligans who happen to seek refuge at the house of the daughter’s parents—and the father exerting bloody revenge. One of these films is considered high art; the other one basic exploitation and the differences are illuminating. In Bergman’s version, the vengeance doesn’t right things, and some atonement will be required—as opposed to the revenge of later American version of the story. Still, for the unaware viewer, the slide from a typical Bergman medieval drama into genre-adjacent revenge territory can be surprising—I somehow didn’t remember the film’s narrative, and was as surprised as anyone else when the film got far more violent than its dull first few minutes suggest. The climactic sequence, with its drawn-out revenge against guilty and innocents alike, is not played like a vengeance fantasy and that may be our biggest clue as to what distinguishes the high and low versions of the same plot. Of course, the Bergman version does conclude on an elegiac note as the father promises to repent for the violence by building a church over the spring that emerged from under his daughter’s corpse—a far, far cry from the grandguignolesque 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left that concluded with a bad guy’s head exploding in a microwave. Somehow, I don’t think Bergman would have approved of that variation.

(Criterion Streaming, September 2019) While I’ve managed to remain interested in some of Ingmar Bergman’s movies, my default assessment toward them remains that of the prototypical European art-house film: long, dull, definitely not aimed at me. Wild Strawberries doesn’t escape that assessment—it’s the story of an older man on a road trip, using the time on the road and stops on the way to reflect on his life and loves. Running on nostalgia for the character’s past, it’s a series of episodes as secondary characters board the car, they make a few stops, and everything he experiences lead him to reflect even more intently on his past. I don’t dislike the results (the film does score more than a few good moments), but I’m not exactly amazed either—it’s a fine film, but one that will speak louder to others. I strongly suspect that I like it more now than I would had I seen it twenty years ago, and will like it even more in twenty years. But for now, Wild Strawberries feels like middle-of-the-road Bergman to me, reusing familiar tools to deliver something that appeals to his own sensibilities. A success by that metric, but not necessarily a guaranteed good time for audiences.

(Kanopy Streaming, November 2018) There seems to be no limit to the Ingmar Bergmanesque nature of Ingmar Bergman’s movies—by which I mean that whatever cliché you can conjure up in your mind about European arthouse movies (pretentious, implausible, black-and-white, handful of actors, dull, dour, slow-paced, inconclusive, rural-set, etc, etc, etc.) there’s bound to be a Bergman movie that meets and exceeds those clichés, fully justifying them. Through a Glass Darkly is not dissimilar to Persona in being set in a beach cottage, but it feels considerably duller even as it delves into mental problems, incest, parent abandonment, psychosis and the family lives of writers. It’s the kind of film that downplays whatever assets it has, and then ends on a note fit to make viewers shrug in indifference. The camera rarely moves, and while the actors are good at what they’re given, what they’re given isn’t enough. I’m lucky that this isn’t my first Bergman film, otherwise I may have given up entirely on his oeuvre.

(Kanopy Streaming, October 2018) Considering that Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh’s Seal is often cited (not always favourably) as being the quintessential European art-house film, I approached the film with some caution. I don’t particularly like the kind of film that The Seventh Seal is said to typify, and was expecting the worst and the dullest. Considering these expectations, I was pleasantly surprised … but not much. Nor by much. But the film is rather more amusing than expected—absurd, profound, visually inventive at times but especially funnier in a dark fashion. Needless to say, “better than expected” isn’t much of a recommendation—I still found it long, meandering, atonal and trying, but it wasn’t quite as bad as I feared. This doesn’t quite translate into a recommendation, but no matter—The Seventh Seal’s reputation in history is secure, and I’m not going to make much of a dent in it … nor will I add much more to this review.

(On Cable TV, April 2018) There may have been dragons, aliens, global conspiracies and vampires in Fanny och Alexander but I’ll never know because it seemed that I slept a thousand nights during the film’s running time and yet things never seemed to change. This is director Ingmar Bergman reflecting upon his childhood in a small Swedish village, and so you can imagine that the film is low on spectacle—while there’s some heavy drama involving kids being abused by their step-father, and someone being burned alive in an attempt to escape, the film spends far more time creating an atmosphere (most notably around a rather lovely Christmas celebration). To be fair, there are ghosts and nudity and violence here, but most of them come rather late in a duration time for more than three hours—at which point I simply didn’t care about much else than making it to the end of Fanny och Alexander even through brief comatic episodes. So it goes when I’m placed in front of much European art-house stuff—I’m easily bored.