Face to Face (1976)

          Some films are best appreciated as the vessels that deliver extraordinary performances, and Ingmar Bergman’s probing psychological drama Face to Face is an example. Liv Ullman, one of Bergman’s most frequent collaborators, renders an extraordinary characterization as a woman succumbing to madness. Her portrayal climaxes in an epic-length crying/laughing jag that represents some of the most vulnerable work you’ll ever encounter in a movie—like all the best actors, she creates the illusion that she’s peeled off her skin, metaphorically speaking, to let viewers she the blood and viscera pumping underneath. The resulting sense of connection between actor and viewer is powerful to experience. The same cannot necessarily be said of the film as a whole. Although Ullman is in nearly every scene and remains compelling throughout, the story is a fairly standard iteration of Bergman’s style.

          Dr. Jenny Isaksson (Ullman) is a psychiatrist stuck in an unsatisfying marriage, so when she meets suave Dr. Tomas Jacobi (Erland Josephson) at a party, she indulges his romantic overtures—up to a point. After a first date during which she startles Tomas by asking clinical questions about his planned technique for sexual conquest, she later tests his interest even further by having a major breakdown in his presence. Eventually, Jenny’s torment leads her to attempt suicide, and that lands her in a psych ward. Amazingly, Tomas remains loyal to her, visiting Jenny on a regular basis while she wrestles with her demons. Since Bergman was never a sentimentalist, he’s not after the notion that love conquers all—Face to Face expresses something closer to the idea that love makes the pain of existence incrementally more tolerable.

         Along the way to articulating that mildly comforting expression, Bergman visits many dark places. Interestingly, the vignettes that connect most strongly in Face to Face are the unadorned ones, where Bergman employs nothing but acting and mise-en-scène, even though Face to Face contains a long surrealistic sequence that recalls the visually experimental Bergman of old—shades of The Seventh Seal (1957). The surrealistic sequence takes viewers inside Jenny’s mind. Wearing a metaphorically rich red dress, she drifts through pieces of her life, for instance raging at her parents. This sequence represents a noble attempt at bringing a character’s interior life to the surface, but it’s perhaps too linear and obvious to genuinely evoke a disturbed mental state.

          Plus, as with many of Bergman’s dramas, there’s the overarching aesthetic question of how much emotional horror an audience should be asked to endure. Beyond Jenny’s breakdown, her suicide attempt, her institutionalization, and her wrenching dream sequence, Face to Face also includes an attempted rape and various scenes of interpersonal cruelty. Face to Face is tough to get through, and not every viewer will agree it’s worth the investment of attention and endurance.

Face to Face: GROOVY

The Touch (1971)

          For American audiences, one of the challenges inherent to watching Ingmar Bergman’s extraordinary psychological dramas is reading past the subtitles—Bergman wrote such dense dialogue in his native Swedish language that one must assume something was lost in translation. Therefore, whenever something sounds arch or false in, say, the American-release version of Wild Strawberries (1957), it’s easy to imagine that the words sounded more natural in their original rendering. All of this is a long way of saying that the tricky issue of Bergman’s verbal style is unavoidable when discussing The Touch, one of only two features the director made in English. Although the film has all of Bergman’s customary gravitas, intensity, nuance, and sensitivity, it also contains stiff dialogue that sounds more like a series of clinical psychiatric diagnoses than actual words that actual humans might say to each other. Strange as it might sound to fault a great filmmaker for infusing his work with erudition and intelligence, The Touch is an especially frosty piece of business.

          Bergman regular Bibi Andersson plays Karin Vergerus, a pretty Swedish housewife and mother whose world starts to unravel when her own mother dies. Immediately after receiving the bad news, she encounters David Kovac (Elliot Gould), an American archaeologist visiting Sweden. He’s professionally acquainted with Karin’s husband, Andreas (played, of course, by Max von Sydow), so Karin soon finds herself sitting across a dinner table from the man she saw at her lowest moment. David surprises Karin by saying that he fell in love with her at first sight, and even though that should have been a red flag—the fact that he was turned on by her pain correctly indicates that David has issues—Karin commences an affair with David. Per his rarefied narrative approach, Bergman is only marginally interested in soap-opera complications, such as how the lovers conceal their trysts, because he’s after a referendum on marriage and personhood. What was missing from Karin’s union that she finds by spending time with David? Did Andreas’ condescension push his wife away? How did Karin recognize that David was compatible in the sense of being just as emotionally troubled as her? It says a lot that at one point, Anna describes herself and David as being “painfully united.”

          Had The Touch been made by anyone except Bergman, it might have seemed groundbreaking and revelatory, an adultery story that asks deep questions about whether it’s truly possible for people to connect with each other. Yet Bergman had already spent decades probing the human psyche prior to making The Touch, so the film seems like a minor entry in his magnificent filmography. The Touch has incisive moments, notably the scene when Karin catalogs her own physical flaws after revealing herself to David for the first time, so it’s not as if Bergman’s gifts suddenly evaporated. Nonetheless, the transition to English removed less than it added, and Gould’s greatest attribute as a performer—his rumpled naturalism—is inhibited by the requirement to deliver reams of artistically structured dialogue. Combined with the picture’s almost unrelentingly humorless tone and a somewhat pointless ending, all of these shortcomings make The Touch unmemorable.

The Touch: FUNKY

The Serpent’s Egg (1977)

          Swedish director Ingmar Bergman had such a consistent and singular voice that, generally speaking, even his misfires feel like attempts at scaling the same thematic mountain atop which he made his most important discoveries. Proving there’s an exception to every rule is The Serpent’s Egg, one of two English-language pictures that Bergman directed and the closest thing to a Hollywood movie that Bergman ever made. Disjointed, meandering, and stiff, the picture seems like one of Bergman’s signature psychological dramas until it evolves (or devolves) into a conspiracy thriller with a hint of science fiction. Worse, The Serpent’s Egg has elements that are highly derivative of Bob Fosse’s extraordinary musical Cabaret (1972), even though Bergman was usually an artist whom others emulated, not the other way around.

          Reading about the circumstances surrounding The Serpent’s Egg provides some illumination, since Bergman was a tax exile from Sweden at the time he collaborated on this picture with American star David Carradine and Italian producer Dino Di Laurentiis. Sometimes, less-than-ideal situations push artists toward unexpected creative breakthroughs. In this case, it seems adversity bested Bergman.

          In 1923 Germany, American circus acrobat Abel Rosenberg (Carradine) reels from the suicide of his brother and performing partner, finding himself adrift and nearly penniless in a foreign land at a time of growing anti-Semitism. Abel finds comfort by spending time with his brother’s ex-wife, dancehall performer Manuela (Liv Ullman), but fate appears to have chosen Abel for a punching bag. As he wrestles with depression, looks for work, and half-heartedly investigates his brother’s life and death, Abel has a number of strange and/or violent encounters until discovering a conspiracy involving medical experimentation. As in Cabaret, the idea is to foreshadow the evil looming over Germany in the years preceding World War II. Yet while Cabaret found a perfect set of characters and metaphors to illustrate the means by which a society succumbs to tyranny, Bergman flails about while looking for something to ground his slapped-together storyline.

          At his best, Bergman created believably complicated individuals and drilled down into their psyches—so to say that he’s out of his element staging fist fights and mad-doctor scenes is to offer a considerable understatement. Nonetheless, The Serpent’s Egg looks as exquisite as any other Bergman production, mostly because Bergman’s regular cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, creates remarkable atmosphere and texture. Furthermore, Bergman’s muse, Ullman, renders a committed performance despite playing a role that borders on the nonsensical. As for Carradine, he seems lost, with the script’s contrived scenarios and stilted dialogue precluding him from manifesting his usual naturalism.

The Serpent’s Egg: FUNKY

Cries and Whispers (1972)

          One of the most acclaimed films from a body of work containing multiple masterpieces, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers is disturbing, mysterious, and profound. Those who avoid Bergman’s work because they dread emotionally wrenching narratives and existentially themed monologues will find the experience of watching Cries and Whispers challenging, because it’s unrelentingly bleak. The concept of death permeates every frame, and characters wrestle with demons including betrayal, hopelessness, self-loathing, and suicidal impulses. The movie also contains a gruesome scene of self-abuse, and a painful sequence in which a man assaults his lover’s psyche by listing all of her faults, external and internal, until she’s deeply wounded. Like all of Berman’s important films, Cries and Whispers explores how the battlefield of the human condition intersects with the caprice of fate, essentially cataloguing the thousand cuts we inflict on each other every day while also recognizing the likely futility of existence.

          Set in a remote country estate sometime in the 19th century, the film follows two sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), as they care for their dying sister Agnes (Harriet Andersson) with the help of a God-fearing maid, Anna (Kari Sylwan). The sure knowledge that Agnes will die after a long period of suffering compels the other women to search their souls, and none likes what she finds. Despite having already suffered a terrible loss, the death of a child, Anna endures the least torture, because she has God for comfort, but even she experiences shattering emotional pain. Karin approaches madness thanks to the unhappy dynamics of her marriage to Fredrik (Georg Arlin), and Karin’s story culminates with a ghastly scene of Karin mutilating herself while an appalled Fredrik watches. Maria, haunted by memories of her dead mother (played in flashbacks by Ullmann), withstands the cruelty of her lover, David (Erland Josephson), because he’s the one who bombards Maria with withering criticisms of her aging facial features as well as her “laziness, indifference, boredom.”

          Bergman observes all of this anguish with a mixture of chilly distance and disquieting intimacy. Sometimes he trains the camera so closely on a face that every microscopic nuance of emotion is visible, and sometimes he composes stylized tableaux that are rich with visual metaphors. Bergman’s frequent collaborator, cinematographer Sven Nykvist, won an Oscar for his work on this movie, and his images—laden with the color red, motifs of clocks, and other loaded signifiers—are exquisite whenever mise en scène takes the fore and unobtrusive whenever performance is the focal point. Not every effect that Bergman renders here is perfect. The dialogue often addresses complex emotional states too perfectly, leaving the way that real humans speak behind; the nonstop onslaught of misery becomes distractingly oppressive; and some of the more art-designed elements border on the pretentious. If anyone has license to venture too far into these areas, however, it is Bergman, who proves again with this film that he is, was, and probably always will be the cinema’s boldest and most incisive psychological clinician.

Cries and Whispers: GROOVY

A Little Night Music (1977)

          Considering his godhead status in the world of musical theater, composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim has been strangely unrepresented in movies. Although most of his major plays have been telecast in some form or another, to date only six have become feature films: West Side Story (1961), Gypsy (1962), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), A Little Night Music (1977), Sweeney Todd (2007), and Into the Woods (2014). The 30-year gap between A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd is partially attributable to musicals going out of fashion, and it’s fair to say that West Side Story is, to date, the only unqualified smash Sondheim movie adaptation. Still, a talent of Sondheim’s stature surely deserves better in general—and better, specifically, than the middling film version of A Little Night Music.

          Adapted from the Ingmar Bergman movie Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), which also inspired Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), A Little Night Music premiered onstage in 1973, introducing the bittersweet ballad “Send in the Clowns.” Cover versions by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins popularized the tune. Like many of Sondheim’s musicals, A Little Night Music is a sophisticated collage of intricate musicality and rigorous wordplay, to say nothing of complex plotting, so it was hardly a natural for a mainstream adaptation. Indeed, the movie version was financed by a German company and distributed in the U.S. by, off all entities, Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.

          Elizabeth Taylor, far from the apex of her box-office power but still a formidable presence, leads a cast including Len Cariou, Lesley-Anne Down, and Diana Rigg. Set in turn-of-the-century Austria, A Little Night Music tracks the romantic travails of a group of wealthy but lonely people. For instance, middle-aged lawyer Fredrik (Cariou) has recently married his second wife, 18-year-old beauty Anne (Down), though he carries a torch for middle-aged actress Desiree (Taylor). Meanwhile, Fredrik’s son, priest-in-training Erich (Christopher Guard), wrestles with sexual longing and family friend Countess Charlotte (Rigg) laments the passage of time.

          The movie opens with the characters performing onstage as the song “Night Waltz” presents rarified central themes (one lyric states that “love is a lecture on how to correct your mistakes”). After a graceful transition to location photography, the movie winds through its narrative, and most numbers are staged as intimate dramatic scenes. As always, Sondheim’s language is dazzling. Anne assures the sex-crazed Erich that “my lap isn’t one of the devil’s snares,” and Fredrik offers the following observation: “I’m afraid being young in itself is a trifle ridiculous.” In one of A Little Night Music’s nimblest numbers, “Soon,” Fredrik contemplates ravaging his wife, who remains a virgin nearly a year into their marriage (“I still want and/or love you,” Fredrik sings). Although Broadway veteran Cariou has a strong voice, the best performance actually comes from Rigg, who imbues “Every Day a Little Death” with hard-won wisdom. Conversely, Taylor fails to impress when she delivers “Send in the Clowns.” In fact, Taylor is the film’s biggest weak spot, thanks to her distracting cleavage and flamboyant acting and weak singing.

          Yet the ultimate blame for the mediocre nature of this film must fall on Harold Prince, who directed the original Broadway production as well as the movie, and on Sondheim. Prince’s filmmaking is humorless and mechanical, failing to translate the elegance of the material into cinematic fluidity. And for all their intelligence and sophistication, Sondheim’s songs are frequently cumbersome and pretentious. The film version of A Little Night Music contains many fine elements, but if it served as any viewer’s first introduction to Sondheim, the viewer might be perplexed as to what the fuss over the Grammy-, Oscar-, Pulitzer- and Tony-winning songsmith is all about.

A Little Night Music: FUNKY

Autumn Sonata (1978)

          Although Autumn Sonata borders on self-parody because writer-director Ingmar Bergman indulges his pain-freak sensibilities to an excessive degree, the innate humanism and sophistication of his style—combined with two extraordinary performances—give the picture resonance. A tough drama about the ways parents and children hurt each other when they’re unable to connect, the film is particularly noteworthy as the only project on which cinema’s two most famous Bergmans collaborated: Swedish-born Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman returned to her native land (and her native tongue) to give one of the most affecting performances of her career.

          Swedish-cinema icon Liv Ullmann plays Eva, a middle-aged woman living in a remote part of Sweden with her husband, meek pastor Viktor (Halvar Björk). Eva excitedly prepares for a rare visit by her mother, Charlotte (Bergman), a world-famous concert pianist. Immediately upon Charlotte’s arrival, however, myriad complications in the mother/daughter dynamic become evident. For instance, Charlotte is supremely chilly and withholding. Accordingly, while Eva was growing up, Charlotte was an absentee parent who expected her domestic existence life to be sunny and undemanding; by shunning family-oriented stress, Charlotte made real emotional connection with her daughter impossible. As a result, Eva became bitter, insecure, and needy. Thus, upon reuniting with her mother, Eva can’t stop herself from dumping loads of resentment onto Charlotte given the slightest opportunity. Furthermore, Eva surprises Charlotte by revealing that Charlotte’s other daughter, Eva’s sister Helena (Lena Nyman), is living in Eva’s house. Helena is severely disabled, and Charlotte finds time spent in Helena’s company excruciating—Helena radiates emotional thirst that Charlotte cannot quench.

          Filmed in extremely close quarters (the story rarely leaves Viktor’s humble house), Autumn Sonata is suffocatingly bleak. Writer-director Bergman almost never leavens the intense psychodrama with brightness or humor, so viewers are smothered by the dysfunction and pain of two complex women caught in an abusive cycle. At one point, the picture gets so heavy that Eva muses, via voice-over, how much she wishes she could simplify her existence by committing suicide. It is a testament to both leading actors that neither Charlotte nor Eva comes across as caricatured or contrived; these people seem agonizingly real.

          Adding to the grim quality of the experience is Ingmar Bergman’s choice to treat the piece more like a novel or play than pure cinema; actors speak in long, unbroken monologues and, on many occasions, speak directly to the camera or in theatrical soliloquies. Were it not for the amber-tinged beauty of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography and the consummate skill of the leading performances, the film’s arty flourishes would be fatal flaws. But with writer-director Bergman’s masterful hand pulling the strings, Autumn Sonata feels less like indulgence and more like an experiment—it’s as if the filmmaker deliberately discarded arbitrary storytelling conventions and used whatever tools he could in order to push as deeply into the anguished souls of his characters as possible.

Autumn Sonata: GROOVY