Category: Highly Recommend / Must-See

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 20min

There is little wonder why All These Women has been so maligned over the years as one of Ingmar Bergman’s worst films. This brightly coloured pastiche is about the furthest thing one could imagine from the black-and-white meditations on faith and love which have defined his greatest artistic triumphs up to this point. Even his previous comedies such as Smiles of a Summer Night carry a more eloquent wit than the slapstick and buffoonery he happily indulges in here, and which one snobbish music critic awkwardly inflicts on the film’s country chateau setting while visiting famed cellist Felix. Cornelius hopes to write a biography on the reclusive musician and additionally get his own composition broadcast on the radio, but unfortunately his host has made himself scarce, leaving the writer in the hands of his seven female companions. Bergman is swinging wildly in all directions with his comedy, but the point of his derision is firm – this industry of artists and critics is a totally vacuous farce.

Quite significantly, All These Women also marks Bergman’s foray into colour filmmaking, imbuing Felix’s grand summer estate with a Baroque radiance that is ironically tempered in a largely monochrome production design. The towering candelabras, marble floors, and undecorated walls are pristine in their silvery whiteness, while costumes and the odd piece of furnishing imprint dark shapes on the mise-en-scène. As such, the small flourishes of colour that Bergman inserts truly stand out in his scenery. The flowing pink gown Cornelius wears while in disguise, the dusty orange sunrise shedding light across Felix’s bedroom, and the vivid red outfits at his final concert each become the centrepiece of multiple compositions, many of which carry the symmetrical precision of Peter Greenaway’s films.

Of course, Greenaway was still sixteen years away from his cinema debut at this point though. Bergman’s actual influences here are incredibly diverse, appropriating the Technicolor vibrancy of Michael Powell’s mannered dramas, the heightened physical comedy of the Marx Brothers’ zany hijinks, and the formal self-reflexivity of Jean-Luc Godard’s genre deconstructions. Though a little subtler, the parody of Federico Fellini’s 8½ in All These Women is also notable. Both films share a dazzling Italian spa set and a postmodern critique of artistic egos, but Bergman’s strongest critique of the Italian filmmaker is directed at his relationship with women.

Much like Guido’s dream in 8½, Felix is surrounded by a harem of adoring female fans in All These Women, played by many of Bergman’s frequent collaborators including Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, and Bibi Andersson. There are seven in total, many bearing nicknames drawn from art history, Irish legend, and Christian theology. Bumblebee is his “official” mistress who takes an immediate liking to the foppish Cornelius, while Adelaide is his discontent wife, and Isolde is the flirty chambermaid. Filling out the rest of the female ensemble is Felix’s ageing patroness, his student protégé, his young cousin, and his piano accompanist, each serving their own clearly defined roles in his home, and collectively serving his outsized ego.

Though the imagery he crafts from his rigorous blocking of these women clearly indicates a director who has trained in the art of visual composition, it still possesses more of a still-life, painterly aesthetic than we have seen from Bergman before. Characters pose in tableaux of upper-class elegance around lounges, sculptures, and grand pianos, making for a brilliantly jarring contrast to his otherwise lowbrow humour. While the women gossip at the poolside surrounded by Greek-style columns and sculptures, Bergman ruptures a splendidly composed wide shot with Cornelius’ abrupt appearance in a swan-shaped pool float. The critic’s humiliation only intensifies when later pushed to dress in unconvincing drag, hoping that he might finally be granted audience if Felix believes there is a new woman on the estate. Even the musician’s graceful cello music has an incongruent counterpoint in the recurring instrumental motif of ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’, amusingly shifting musical styles with each new variation.

Still, for a director like Bergman with such powerful command over comedy and drama though, it is evident that he is not always playing to his strengths. Some of the film’s harshest critics will point to its sped-up chase scenes, overlong physical gags, and parts of Jarl Kulle’s exaggerated performance as evidence of the film’s messiness, and they aren’t entirely wrong. Even with the targets of Bergman’s satire in mind, much of this humour is far too clumsy.

When Bergman develops his comedy with a little more self-awareness though, he hits on something far more inspired. One could almost imagine Monty Python pulling off a similar trick when he cuts away from Bumblebee and Cornelius’ sex scene, flashes up title cards reading “To avoid censorship, the act of lovemaking is depicted as follows,” and segues into a tame, black-and-white ballroom dance. Similarly, when Cornelius accidentally sets off a box of seemingly unlimited pyrotechnics, Bergman is sure to inform us that “The fireworks should not be taken symbolically.”

There’s no doubt that this is among Bergman’s most formally experimental films to date, and by far his most playful. On a structural level he is often pulling his narrative in non-linear directions, and even chooses to open the film with the final scene of Felix’s funeral. His fate is thus sealed from the start and is seemingly confirmed when an assassination plot is revealed – ludicrously motivated, as it turns out, by Felix’s own desire to be executed for demeaning his art. When the time comes for his big radio concert where Adelaide will pull the trigger though, there is no need for murder. Felix anticlimactically dies of natural causes, leaving his women to mourn and Cornelius to conjecture the rest of his biography alone.

Even in death, this object of everyone’s worship is an obscure, mysterious figure. His face has been conveniently obscured the whole time, leaving a great deal to the imagination when each women sees his dead body and vaguely proclaims “He looks the same, and yet so different.” Perhaps each of them have conceived their own unique ideas of him, as when Cornelius begins reading his biography, none can agree on a single description.

Not that it really matters at this point. The arrival of a new cellist in the house immediately soaks up all the love, affection, and attention once reserved for Felix, thereby relegating him to the pages of Cornelius’ history book. That we never really knew a whole lot about the famed musician makes this a particularly smooth transition. In the conceited world of All These Women, men are but faceless idols cycling in and out of fashion, hiding with infatuated fanatics behind facades of highbrow culture. Through Bergman’s irreverent pastiche and mischievous mockery, at least one truth becomes absolutely evident – art has no real relevance to the narcissistic pretensions of artists.

All These Women is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 33min

Life is a circus, Ingmar Bergman posits in Sawdust and Tinsel, creating entertainment out of backstage affairs and laughter out of humiliation. It travels long, grey roads from one location to the next, never staying anywhere long enough to grow roots and thrive. It has a strange pull over those trapped in its cycles – the ringleader of this specific troupe, Albert, dreams of leaving it all behind, but realistically this is not something he could ever be satisfied with. When he meets his estranged wife, Agda, who has since settled down and found peace, there is nothing about her stagnant existence that is even slightly appealing to him.

“Year in and year out… everything stands still. For me it’s fulfillment.”

“For me it’s emptiness.”

Therein lies the irreconcilable difference between the nomadic buffoons of Sawdust and Tinsel and the ordinary people they fall for. Albert and his mistress, Anne, will find disappointment wherever they go, but at their very core is a desire for those perpetual distractions which save them from self-pity. In the very first scene as a trail of wagons ascends hills and crosses bridges, Albert joins the coachman to hear the story of how the circus clown, Frost, pathetically tried to cover up his wife as she went swimming in front of nearby soldiers. Bergman renders his flashback through overexposed film, like a bright memory fondly living on in everyone’s minds save for Frost himself. Albert would do well to take the clown’s mistake as a lesson rather than mere entertainment, though given the parallel trajectory that he heads down in Sawdust and Tinsel as a cuckolded man trying to save face, it appears that his embarrassing story may too one day be recounted as a light-hearted joke at his expense.

Bergman’s wry sense of humour is stronger than ever here, marking a shift in his career away from the troubled romances of youth and towards more philosophically minded dramas with sharp, witty edges. So too does it mark another step forward for him as a visual filmmaker, pairing for the very first time with cinematographer Sven Nykvist who would go on to shoot seventeen more of his films right into the 1980s. In many exterior scenes, and especially that opening montage of wagons trailing across grassy landscapes, the horizon looks as if it has been smothered by a giant grey blanket and pushed right to the bottom of the frame, along with the lowly people who traverse it.

As we move indoors, a Wellesian deep focus takes hold of the camera, letting Bergman’s typically excellent blocking emerge in dressing rooms and theatres. It is here where divisions are drawn between characters, both in the layers of visual depth and the cluttered production design, as Frans’ seduction of Anne in his trailer frequently splits them between mirrors in beautifully fragmented compositions. Bergman works wonders with this sort of framing, in one shot catching Frans’ reflection while he stands behind the camera, and having him dangle an amulet right in front of the lens. With a simple image, Anna is tempted away from the life she has grown sick of, and a physical barrier is simultaneously drawn between them. When they are united in this cramped space though, it is of course the mirror which brings them together, inviting an intimacy which she cannot find in her relationship with Albert.

Whether in his personal or professional life, Albert can barely catch a break from anyone, as even when he approaches the local theatre director, Mr Sjuberg, and asks to borrow costumes, he is turned down with a savagely poetic soliloquy. From a low angle, Gunnar Björnstrand stands against an imposing backdrop of the stage’s ornate ceiling and chandelier, drawing a snooty distinction between creators with noble ambitions such as himself, and those like Albert who belong at the bottom of society’s ladder.

“We make art. You make artifice. The lowest of us would spit on the best of you. Why? You only risk your lives. We risk our pride.”

Only an artist with as much self-awareness as Bergman could write a passage so sharply satirical of his own profession. To consider one’s ego as more precious than life is to deem oneself above the material world, and to equally condemn those material beings such as Albert to the “world of misery, lice, and disease” they have always known.

As an actor in Mr Sjuberg’s cast, Frans is just as much an advocate of this classist thinking, topping off his cuckolding of Albert with one final act of sadistic humiliation in the hapless ringleader’s own circus. Starting with a few sexual taunts thrown Anne’s way as she rides a horse around the tent, Albert quicky gets involved too, whipping off Frans’ hat in a show of petty power. It is a brutal, bloody brawl that follows – a struggle of masculine dominance which simply ends up asserting the same rigid hierarchy which makes Albert, Anne, and their troupe the butt of society’s joke.

There is nothing but a sorrowful look shared between these two lovers before it is time for them to move on again, riding across monochrome landscapes with the rest of their misfit crew in much the same way they came in. Life’s tragicomic farce continues, undercutting dreams of escaping its stranglehold with constant reminders of their own inadequacy. If there is any solace, at least those embarrassing stories will make for great comic fodder down the track, offering momentary distractions from their sad, squalid circumstances. Bergman needles the existential drama of Sawdust and Tinsel with a fine, sophisticated point, and in his extraordinary staging finds both sympathy and outright pity for its wayfaring circus performers doomed to eternal ridicule.

Sawdust and Tinsel is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.