Guru Dutt is incredibly resourceful in the glorious Bollywood spectacle of Aar Paar, spinning a simple love triangle off into a breezy comedy, a sumptuous melodrama, and a thrilling crime plot, and landing one high-spirited ex-convict in the middle of it all as the master of his choices.
Armed with a camera that moves with all the elegance of a gentle breeze, and a sophisticated charm which lightly alternates between comedy and tragedy, Max Ophüls lays out parables of pleasure and happiness in Le Plaisir, poetically considering their shared harmonies and incongruencies.
Dreams, memories, and symbols drift by on the powerful current of Ingmar Bergman’s poetic screenplay in Wild Strawberries, turning one elderly professor’s road trip into a spiritual vessel of self-reckoning that confronts the many estranged relationships he has accumulated, and penetrating the surreal depths of his guilty mind through beautifully existential imagery.
William A. Wellman stages a textured web of strained family dynamics with incredible visual detail in Track of the Cat, offering an unassumingly spiritual consideration of colonial masculinity in its psychological western drama, and fastidiously binding it all together with a ravishing monochrome palette where spiteful sterility thrives.
Ingmar Bergman’s pensive journey of faith and doubt leads us through barren, plague-ridden landscapes in The Seventh Seal, imposing a stark beauty on his theological iconography and poetic contemplations which confirm this existential medieval fable as a historical feat of philosophical screenwriting.
The complex web of betrayals, seductions, and alliances within the aristocratic ensemble of Smiles of a Summer Night is tantalising to watch for its sharp class satire, and yet Ingmar Bergman also buries a profound wisdom into his intoxicating chaos, deepening its joyful wonder with blessings for new beginnings and second chances.
The romantic fantasies that young model Doris and her agent Susanne chase down are blindly hinged on the belief that men are not lazy, mediocre creatures, and Ingmar Bergman delicately maps out the psychological terrain of these compulsive desires all through Dreams, leading both generations of women down parallel paths of inevitable disappointment.
A direct translation of Ikiru to English is ‘To Live’, and it is in formally binding one dying bureaucrat’s revitalisation closely to this ideal that Akira Kurosawa gracefully transforms his existential study of mortality into an introspective consideration of life’s intrinsic purpose, infusing this profound spiritual journey with melancholy visual detail.
A Lesson in Love is an impressive display of comic versatility for a relatively minor Ingmar Bergman film, sending his sober marital drama crashing into idiosyncratic foibles where screwball humour, sophisticated wit, and savage feuds intermingle.
Life is a circus that creates entertainment out of humiliation, Ingmar Bergman posits in Sawdust and Tinsel, and in his rich staging and screenwriting he needles its existential drama with a finer, wittier point than ever before, finding both sympathy and pity for its hapless fools doomed to eternal ridicule.
