Category: Highly Recommend

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 47min

Though often described as a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, Saraband is not so much an interrogation of that famous relationship which saw divorce rates rise across Sweden as it is an observation of the imprint it has left on those younger generations left to carry its legacy. There are a couple of fresh faces present here in Börje Ahlstedt and Julia Dufvenius, while for Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson this film marks the end of an era. Not only is it their final collaboration with Ingmar Bergman, but for the celebrated Swedish director it is also his last work before he passed away in 2007, and a notable return to form after many years of creating less-than-admirable television movies.

Saraband may not be the first time he has contemplated regrets of old age, though compared to the pensive meditations of Wild Strawberries and Autumn Sonata, this screenplay is far more grounded in Bergman’s firsthand experience of the matter. Save for a few minor dreams and flashbacks, these narrative diversions are excised altogether, and instead this story of reunited ex-lovers is delivered through a series of ten chapters not unlike the six parts of Scenes from a Marriage.

The result is a film that takes the form of a written memoir, framing an aged Marianne as our first-person narrator who pours over photographs of her life, and whose direct addresses to the camera bookend the narrative in a prologue and epilogue. Her absence from so many chapters is not an oversight on Bergman’s part. Each scene in this chamber drama is purposefully written as a two-hander, crafting rich dynamics from all the possible pairings between our four central characters – Marianne, Johan, his estranged son Henrik, and his freedom-seeking granddaughter Karin. Among them, Marianne appears to be the only one who is most content with herself, having put her psychological demons evident in Scenes from a Marriage to rest many years ago. She does not seek to become an active part of Johan’s family drama, but instead she carries a largely observational and counselling presence, offering warm wisdom to those willing to listen.

For an elderly Johan staring down the end of his life, Marianne’s impromptu visit couldn’t be timelier in helping him make peace with his own psychological troubles. It is somewhat surprising how little animosity there is between them, especially given how firmly he holds onto old grudges against Henrik which consequently left a broken family in their wake. In the absence of his alienated father and deceased wife Anna, Henrik has made the unsettling decision to attempt filling every role in his daughter’s life, thus not only positioning himself as her cello tutor, but also, quite disturbingly, as her lover.

The messiness of human entanglements has long been at the centre of Bergman’s writing, and sixty years after his early melodramas in the 1940s he is quite astonishingly still finding new angles on the jealousy and insecurity that hides within our most intimate relationships. Much like Johan and Marianne’s arguments in Scenes from a Marriage, Henrik’s seething expressions of acrid resentment reveal far more about his own spiteful soul than the target of his derision, taking perverted pleasure in the suffering he mentally projects on his father.

“I hate him in all possible dimensions of the word. I hate him so much, I would like to see him die from a horrible illness. I’d visit him every day, just to witness his torment.”

Ironically enough, it isn’t too hard to imagine Karin a few years down the track holding similar feelings towards the man who speaks these words. Bergman struggles to develop a strong visual aesthetic in Saraband, though the strained relationship between Henrik and Karin becomes abundantly clear in his trademark composition of their parallel faces lying horizontal in bed, as he desperately begs her to audition for a nearby music conservatory so she can stay close by his side.

It isn’t until after speaking with Johan and Marianne individually that Karin finds the courage to set out on a new path, following her friend to Hamburg to perform in an orchestra, and thereby rebelling against her father’s isolative preference for her to pursue a career as a solo cellist. There is a beautiful synchronicity between this arc and the accompanying music too, ringing out the lonely lament of a single cello throughout much of the film, before growing into a full orchestral symphony as Karin envisions a future of her own choosing. Bergman is not a director who typically makes extensive use of film scores, though certainly his love of classical music has persisted through his work ever since 1950’s To Joy, elegantly expressing his characters’ deepest yearnings.

Perhaps the most profound of all these longings though is for a figure who is almost completely absent in Saraband, represented only in the framed photographs that adorn Johan, Henrik, Karin, and even Marianne’s personal spaces. The grace that Anna brought to their lives is sorely missed, and it is only thanks to her that Karin ever really knew what it meant to feel the kind, unselfish love of a parent. Through Anna, Henrik was made fully aware of his failings as a father, and perhaps he might have even been able to fix them had she not passed away. As it is though, all she was able to leave him was a letter written shortly before her death, professing her love yet warning him against further wounding his relationship with Karin.

Unlike virtually everyone else in this ensemble though, Henrik cannot simply let go of those who are ready to move on without him. His failed suicide attempt after Karin’s departure for Berlin is the bleak conclusion to his story, though Bergman decides to sit a little longer with those two characters whose richness and authenticity secured his place in popular culture thirty years prior. As an anxious Johan finds comfort in Marianne’s arms after a night of restless sleep, the two bear their naked bodies to each other for the first time in decades, finding an intimate, humbling honesty that cuts through the existential terror of old age. In the last moments of Bergman’s last film, there are no vicious verbal attacks or extreme acts of spiritual desecration to be found. Much like Marianne, Bergman too finds peace in the act of introspective reminiscence, allowing him to finally appreciate the pure bond between lovers, parents, and children that transcends all other worldly distractions.

Saraband is currently available on DVD from Amazon.

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 41min

Years after Ingmar Bergman’s chamber drama The Passion of Anna was released in 1969, Liv Ullmann was quite frank in admitting that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to express through it, presumably due to the huge personal turmoil that was unfolding between both director and actress on the verge of their breakup. The messiness that resulted is no doubt evident in certain creative choices, with Ullmann’s titular character being largely absent in the first half, and Bergman bringing her back in halfway through with a jarring time jump. At the same time though, this uncertainty also instils his direction with an improvisational quality that he has often kept a distance from in his career, bringing a raw vulnerability to this study of dishonest lovers.

The influence of the French New Wave had slowly been pushing Bergman closer to deconstructions of cinema throughout the 1960s, but perhaps with the exception of the magnificently postmodern Persona, there is little as bluntly self-referential as the interviews he conducts with his actors here. These come in the form of four interludes clearly breaking away from the main narrative and positioning his cast as avatars who know these characters on a far deeper level than any friend, lover, or even themselves.

Max von Sydow is the first of these, speaking of the lonely Andreas Winkelman as a recent divorcee shamefully trying to hide his identity and destroy his means of expression. He stands in sharp contrast to Ullmann’s Anna who claims to desire the absolute truth of her relationships, yet takes refuge in lies, realising too late that reality is uglier than she would like to believe. Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson respectively play troubled spouses Eva and Elis, one being “a woman who can no longer cope with the fact of her own disconnectedness,” and the other an amateur photographer who believes anyone horrified at human madness is a hypocrite. Like so many of Bergman’s films, his rural home island of Fårö plays host to this drama, as its physical isolation pushes these characters to commit cruel, heartless acts against each other.

As for the mystery of who is killing the animals on this island, Bergman purposefully leaves enough ambiguity to suggest that it could be anyone – perhaps with the exception of Andreas who saves a hanging puppy. The clearest suspect in the eyes of the local police and residents is the mentally ill loner Johan, though after he is driven to suicide by a violent mob, it soon becomes apparent that he is innocent. More than anything else, this thread of murders injects The Passion of Anna with menacing undertones, suggesting a desire for sadistic violence in the most ordinary people.

If we are to pin the killings down to a single character though, then perhaps we should look to Anna. Just as the identity of the animal killer is kept uncertain, so too is the truth of her past as a wife and mother, which she asserts was a perfectly happy life before her family perished in a car accident she accidentally caused. After discovering an old letter from her husband also named Andreas, von Sydow’s Andreas Winkelmann sees through the façade – their relationship was full of “complications, which in turn will trigger terrible emotional, agitation, physical and psychological violence.” Often when Anna proclaims her belief in total honesty and “striving for some form of spiritual perfection,” Bergman cuts away to these typed words that have imprinted themselves in Andreas’ sceptical brain, eroding our trust in her words.

That said, it is also perfectly evident that Anna has convinced herself of the lies she has constructed, and so in a strange way there is still a profound honesty in Ullmann’s performance. In one five-minute close-up, she speaks with sincerity about the cliché of two people becoming one through marriage, and then as her monologue turns to the car crash, her head slightly tilts and she turns her glassy gaze just beyond the camera. This is the second of Bergman’s films to be shot in colour, but the first featuring Ullmann, and through this vibrant photography the vivacity of her bright blue eyes can finally be fully appreciated in all their expressive beauty.

Further revealing the depths of Anna’s lingering trauma are her night terrors. The first time they appear we distantly hear her screams from Andreas’ bedroom, though later we see them for ourselves as Bergman’s camera enters her mind. Up to this point he has crafted a rich palette that has shifted from warm summer tones and artificial magic hour photography into the cold dead of winter, though here he reverts to the austere black-and-white imagery of his previous films. Shame draws the closest comparisons of all to the bleak, war-ravaged scenes of Anna sailing across the ocean on a refugee boat, meeting a woman whose son is being executed, and fruitlessly begging her for forgiveness, though Bergman is more cryptic with such surreal symbolism as this. The guilt that haunts her is deeply layered, and only stokes further questions regarding the role she played in her husband and child’s deaths.

With tensions as thick and unresolved as these, it is only inevitable that they will spill over into her relationship with Andreas, and a full-blown expose of each other’s lies violently erupts. If we didn’t have any suspicions by this point that Anna had purposeful intent in killing her family, then they are certainly piqued now as she runs the car containing her and Andreas off the road, with only his quick reflexes saving them both. Both sides frustrated and ruined by the impasse they have reached, Anna leaves Andreas by the side of the road, and Bergman slowly zooms from a long shot into his nervous pacing. “This time he was called Andreas Winkelman,” the running voiceover enigmatically concludes, linking him back to Anna’s deceased husband and suggesting a universal plight that plays out in variations of the same story.

It is far from Bergman’s strongest ending, and The Passion of Anna does not exactly possess the formal strength of his most avant-garde works, yet there remains something compelling about his wrestling with these complex characters dynamics, straining against the violent assault of outside forces. With both Hour of the Wolf and Shame sharing these concerns, a loose thematic trilogy forms around these films, collectively testing the psychological stability of Ullmann and von Sydow’s cynical lovers. Although this is the weakest of the three, watching Bergman deconstruct his own interpersonal vulnerabilities with imperfect honesty offers absorbing insight into the limits of our humanity all the same.

The Passion of Anna is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV.

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 29min

Ingmar Bergman’s first film shot on his home island of Fårö is also the first in his unofficial Faith trilogy, though this does not mean that Through a Glass Darkly was the start of his efforts to confront humanity’s troubled relationship with God. The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring preceded it by a few years, after all. Still, this is a far more contained study than either. Perhaps this is to its slight detriment, given that those other films land with greater formal ambition and impact, but this chamber drama is nonetheless an impressive continuation of his long-running spiritual quandaries.

Gunnar Björnstrand’s biblically-named David is the lonely patriarch of the small family vacationing on the rocky Swedish isle where this story is set, becoming a flawed, God-like figure to his children searching for some divine connection. He suffers from severe writer’s block, and as such finds that his only source of inspiration comes from his daughter Karin’s mental illness. It is a major insecurity for him, especially when he sees how easily ideas for new plays and operas flow from his son Minus. He is envious and self-absorbed, and so he withdraws into his anxious mind, holding back the love his children so desire.

For Minus, it spurs on a desperate desire to hold a thoughtful conversation with his father, while for Karin it manifests even more severely as a schizophrenic desire to contact the voices in her mind – one of whom she is convinced belongs to God Himself. As the most volatile character, she is the centrepiece of Bergman’s drama, and yet it is David who is at the root of its family issues.

The final member of this quartet is Karin’s husband, Martin, played with intellectual grace by Max von Sydow. He is emotionally independent of David, and yet due to the abundant empathy he has to offer his troubled wife, he is drawn into conflict with her father upon discovering his secret diary entries chronicling her illness.

“You know how to express yourself. You always have just the right words. There’s just one thing you haven’t the slightest clue about: life itself. You’re a craven coward but a genius at evasions and excuses. In your novels you’re always courting some god. But let me tell you, your faith and your doubt are very unconvincing. All that’s apparent is your ingenuity. Have you written one word of truth in your life as an author? Your half-lies are so refined that they look like truth.”

Bergman’s dialogue can be eloquently cutting, but the emotions it is conveying can never be reduced to outright contempt. Beneath it all, these characters hold great affection for each other. The trouble comes in trying to express those feelings in the absence of paternal guidance, which is magnified to an even greater extent by the isolation of the island where they are vacationing. Its seascapes are tranquil yet sparse, composed of two vaguely distinct shades of grey divided by a long stretch of horizon, while thin wharfs stretch out into the negative space from stony shorelines. Small clumps of vegetation dot these images, while in the distance a lonely lighthouse stands atop a cliff.

The interiors aren’t much more inviting either, with the torn wallpaper and wooden floorboards offering these characters little warmth. Inside a shipwreck that Karin and Minus escape into from the rain, Bergman even designs a set that could have been from Andrei Tarkovsky, crossing rotting beams across the frame at all angles and trickling water into its collapsed base. Pushed right into the back of the shot we find the siblings huddled together, essentially imprisoned inside a giant manifestation of Karin’s unstable psyche.

Such stark minimalism leaves a rich canvas open for Bergman’s typically superb blocking as well, underscoring the imbalance between characters in two-shots that subtly darken one face and illuminate the other, and frequently hanging on them for minutes at a time without cutting. Sven Nykvist’s lighting is incredibly precise in these close-ups, passing shade over one half of David’s face while deep in contemplation, and specifically highlighting Karin’s wandering eye as she lies next to Martin at night. Like a conductor playing multiple instruments, Bergman orchestrates his staging and performances perfectly, each hitting different frequencies yet harmonising them within a shared doubt in the existence of a caring God.

Harriet Andersson especially benefits from such austere photographic treatment, frequently becoming the camera’s central subject as Karin’s condition worsens and her desire to meet God intensifies. What starts as her hearing the non-existent sound of a calling bird eventually develops into more sinister voices coming from behind a wall, instructing her to commit shameful acts and delivering warnings of God’s impending arrival. When the figure she believes to be Him finally does appear, the invisible sight she witnesses is mortally terrifying – a spider with “cold and calm” eyes, and a “terrible, stony face.”

It is effectively a vision of religion that is brutal and unforgiving, but it is also one which is opposed to the representation of God in David. His love may be questioned at times by those who struggle to connect with him, but it persists nonetheless. “I don’t know if love is proof of God’s existence or if love is God himself,” he ponders to his son. “For you, love and God are the same,” Minus answers.

To the young teenager, the significance of this brief but meaningful discussion has less to do with its subject matter than the fact it happened in the first place. “Papa spoke to me,” he mutters in disbelief, rediscovering his faith in his father through a tangible demonstration of his love. For these children, it is life’s most fundamental necessity, driving them further from reality the more it slips from their grasp. Equally though, Through A Glass Darkly savours those moments of profound affection when they do appear in even the smallest demonstrations, recognising how such powerful connections lead its characters towards a pure, redemptive grace.

Through a Glass Darkly is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 48min

Over the centuries of stories based around Europe’s Midsummer festivities, there has often been a dreamy magic hanging in the air between lovers on its strange, shortened night, reconsidering old passions and finding new beginnings within its otherworldly aura. Most famously, it is the setting upon which Shakespeare’s ensemble of characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream fall under the love spells of the forest fey. Its influence on Ingmar Bergman’s lusty romp Smiles of a Summer Night is evident right there in the name, though this is no direct adaptation of the Bard’s fantastical comedy. Class satire runs sharply through Bergman’s targeting of wealthy aristocrats, bringing them down to the level of the carefree servants who roll around in fields and blithely indulge in their carnal passions. Although there are no whimsical forces guiding these self-conceited characters into each other’s arms, it very much feels that way to those wrapped up in its intoxicating atmosphere.

Before we even arrive at this fateful Midsummer party, Bergman lays out the formal groundwork of each character, examining their place in this intricate web. Several of his regular collaborators are here – Gunnar Björnstrand as successful lawyer Fredrik, Eva Dahlbeck as his ex-lover Desiree, and Harriet Andersson as his housemaid Petra. Jarl Kulle and Margit Carlqvist are also present, both having taken more minor roles in previous Bergman films, and now being given more screen time as Desiree’s consort, Count Carl-Magnus, and his wife, Countess Charlotte. It is near impossible to pick the greatest performance among them. Björnstrand may claim the largest role, but with Andersson’s swaying hips, Dahlbeck’s shrewd scheming, and Kulle’s comical turns of phrase, each actor stands out during their time in the spotlight.

Like so many others, Kulle’s Count lacks total integrity, in one moment threatening that “One can rally with my wife, but touch my mistress and I’m a tiger!” and later inverting it when it is the Countess who he is at risk of losing. The extreme moods of these characters shift with the whims of their desire, filling them with jealousy, anger, and passion, but very little substance. Desiree even shows some self-awareness of this while arguing with Fredrik, digging herself deeper into a rage that she can’t remember the reason for.

“I’m speaking! I will speak, even if I have nothing to say! You’ve made so furious, that I forgot what I was thinking!”

Petra on the other hand is the most easy-going character of the bunch, right next to Desiree’s servant, Frid. There is something of a bohemian nature to both as they laugh and merrily recite poetry, which any of their masters might brush off as silly behaviour. “The summer night has three smiles,” Frid starts. “This is the first, between midnight and dawn, when young lovers open their hearts and loins.” The second comes “for the jesters, the fools, and the incorrigible” – perhaps Petra and Frid themselves, who bask in the glory of life while the others engage in petty games and affairs.

“And the summer night smiled for the third time!” he finally announces as the sun rises, “for the sad and dejected, for the sleepless and lost souls, for the frightened and the lonely.” Bergman proves his hand as a skilled comedic writer in Smiles of a Summer Night, and yet in littering his screenplay with such thoughtful reflections he also deepens its joyful wonder, stepping back to observe these tiny figures within the context of something far grander than they realise.

This isn’t to say that Bergman himself is not willing to engage with their trivial drama though. His usual flair for blocking actors using a remarkable depth of field serves a practical purpose here in teasing out the complex web of betrayals, seductions, and alliances at play. Eavesdroppers lurk behind doors in the foreground, listening to private conversations in the next room over, while elsewhere delicate romances flourish in the reflections of ornately framed mirrors and quiet ponds. Unlike many of his previous films which frequently focus on one or two characters per shot, the ensemble dynamic here often forces his camera out into wides rather than close-ups, making for ripe stylistic and narrative comparisons to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.

Bergman capitalises particularly well on this staging at the Midsummer’s Eve dinner party, where Desiree herself plots to manipulate specific relationships based on her seating arrangements. It is an elaborately Gothic set piece in its design, framing characters between melted candelabras, and shrinking them behind a cluttered banquet table of flowers, fruit, bowls, and decorative ornaments. It is also the perfect setting for couples to start breaking apart at the seams – a discussion over whether men or woman are better seducers sets in motion the Countess’ plot to ensnare Fredrik, while he observes his own marriage to 19-year-old Anne crumble as she falls for his son, Henrik. His head laying on the table and her comforting hand on his shoulder are the first things we will notice in this shot, and yet Bergman is sure to block Fredrik’s resentful expression lurking right behind them, signalling a subtle shift in his affection for her.

The eventual consummation of this young, scandalous love comes as a whimsically fated development, shedding that mysterious Midsummer magic of Shakespeare’s play over their unexpected encounter. An earlier reveal of a secret lever which wheels in a bed from a neighbouring room returns by pure chance, as when Henrik attempts suicide over his attraction to his stepmother, he accidentally activates it. Perhaps in this loose take on Shakespeare’s play, Bergman himself is playing the role of the mischievous sprite Puck through his behind-the-scenes manipulations, as who else should be laying in that bed at that exact time but the one Henrik has been longing for? To him, it could very well be a dying vision, while to the slowly waking Anne, it is a sensual dream. Still, that tiny nudge from the universe is all it takes for them to elope, creating a knock-on effect which neatly ties up the remaining strings Bergman has been slyly pulling this whole time.

“Love is a loathsome business,” Anne piercingly proclaims to the Countess at one point, and the suffering it entails for those who corrupt its purity certainly frame it as such. Much like the game of croquet the upper-class men play on the lawn, it turns “an innocent game into an offensive battle of prestige,” wherein each player keeps one-upping the others until egos and relationships are destroyed. On a night such as Midsummer’s Eve though, the universe seems to be resetting itself by way of playful chaos to make way for fresh new starts, and such grievances need not last long. Even beyond its class satire and complex characters, Bergman buries a profound wisdom deep in Smiles of a Summer Night, blessing his noble fools and foolish nobles alike with second chances that let them simultaneously embrace new possibilities, and learn to appreciate those they had forgotten.

Smiles of a Summer Night is currently streaming The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 27min

The romantic dreams that young model Doris and her agent Susanne each chase down in the city of Gothenburg are blindly hinged on the belief that men are not inherently disappointing creatures. Both women are separated in age by about a decade or so, and the gap in maturity shows. While Doris thoughtlessly breaks up with her boyfriend and passionately launches herself into a new affair with the first man to shower her with affection, Susanne slowly unravels as she rides into the city where an old flame resides. Lights from outside the carriage pass rhythmically across her sweaty face, we follow her rapidly shifting gaze between ‘open’ and ‘shut’ signs, and as she mutters an apprehensive resolution to “see him,” Ingmar Bergman maps out the psychological terrain of her anxious, compulsive desire.

Dreams arrived in 1955 a mere two years before Bergman’s major breakthroughs The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, and though critical praise was lukewarm at the time, within it are sure signs of a maturing artistic voice moving towards a higher level of filmmaking. The first five minutes of this film are spent in the wordless silence of Susanne’s modelling studio – fresh prints are brought to the agency owner, an assistant lights her cigarette, and finally Doris arrives on set, where the photographer arranges her in elegant poses. It is especially one fat man’s lustful, impatient finger tapping which breaks through Bergman’s subdued sound design of luxurious lounge music and ruffling clothes, creating an atmosphere which begs for escape from its own stifled repression. It is only when Susanne and Doris arrive in Gothenburg on their work trip though that any sort of catharsis starts to feel tangible.

This is not a film about the bond between two women though. Bergman keeps them separate throughout most of Dreams, alternating between their parallel stories. His visual compositions are precise and considerate, especially in the constant presence of reflections around Doris as she gazes through shop windows and lets herself be swept away by Gunnar Björnstrand’s wealthy middle-aged consul, Otto. Mirrors follow her into the dressmaker’s shop where he buys her a new gown too, inviting her into his superficial, material world, and she returns the affection as she takes him out to an amusement park. There, Bergman fixes his camera to rollercoasters and spinning rides, letting it fly in manic movements and cutting its footage up into violent montages within a ghost train. While she screams with delight, he is visibly queasy, and though he regains his composure upon taking her home to his giant manor, that uneasy dynamic soon returns.

This time though, Otto’s reservations seem to stem from quiet guilt rather than nausea. A painting of his wife on the wall bears significant resemblance to Doris, but she has been dead for some time now, according to him. When a third party enters the scene, it comes as a surprise – Otto’s daughter’s entrance is framed in a doorway that Doris is peering through, and she immediately launches into a disdainful chastisement of her father’s arrogance.

“You disgust me. I find you ridiculous and repulsive.”

Otto’s wife is not dead, as it turns out, but in a psychiatric hospital he refuses to visit. He is stingy with spending money on his own family, but apparently not on Doris. “Lust overcame tightness this time. It’s a laughable sight,” his daughter derisively proclaims, before quickly realising that he has even gifted her valuable family jewellery. For the first time, there is cold detachment in Bergman’s blocking, poignantly facing Otto and Doris out a window before she awkwardly departs with the realisation she has walked in on a sad, wounded family, and pulled them even further apart.

At least Doris has the excuse of naïve youth behind her though. With Susanne’s extra years of experience, she should know exactly what she is walking back into with her old lover, Henrik. For a time, she dances around the decision, silently passing through forests where she spies on his home, and eventually making the call to meet up. Once again, Bergman chooses to carry this stretch of storytelling without dialogue, absorbing us in elegantly composed shots which themselves become expressions of her silent emotional journey.

The contrast between the Susanne we see in these lonely moments and the woman in control of a modelling agency is quite striking. When Doris misses a shoot, Susanne proves herself to be a harsh, assertive woman, though evidently one simply using this severe demeanour as a cover for her own insecurities. Deep down she is “sick with hatred” for Henrik’s wife, even wishing her dead, and yet this intense loathing frightens her. The further we get into Dreams, the more this seemingly confident woman is layered with internal conflicts.

Quite essential to our reading of Susanne’s vulnerability is also the ways Bergman lights close-ups to perfection, especially his dimming of the backlight to emphasise the contours of each expression passing across her face during her rendezvous with Henrik. For a brief time, she is swept away by his romance and invitation to join him in Oslo for a work trip, though such fantasies are short-lived with the arrival of his shrewd, perceptive wife. Her words are cutting – there is no substance to this man whatsoever. He is lazy and tired, and any illusions one might have about carrying on affair with him would be quickly destroyed by his own inability to commit to anyone. Henrik meekly lingers in the background of this scene, framed right between the two women, and with this succinct visual blocking, Bergman definitively proves his inadequacy.

Dreams is bookended with a return to the modelling studio it started in, signalling a withdrawal to the ordinary lives Doris and Susanne have always known, and effectively putting an end to those far-flung fantasies suggested in its title. Even here though, Bergman continues to draw a brilliant formal contrast between these two heartbreaks, letting the wildly emotional Doris emerge with renewed optimism and love for her boyfriend. Meanwhile, Susanne is driven further into her cynicism, tearing up Henrik’s apology letter and re-invitation to meet him in Oslo. She has evidently been in Doris’ situation before and forgotten how deeply this misery could cut her. Perhaps this is just part of life’s cycles though, Bergman posits, leading both young adults and their older, wiser counterparts down the same paths of inevitable disappointment.

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

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 36min

Ingmar Bergman treads familiar ground in the tragic tale of one young Swedish couple’s idyllic summer fling, and yet there is something about Summer with Monika which goes down even smoother than many of his previous ill-fated love stories. Perhaps its laidback pacing can be given some credit for this, dispensing with his usual flashback structure to meet Harry and Monika at their most innocent and linger in their escape to the Stockholm archipelago. Maybe it is also Harriet Andersson’s remarkable debut film performance, the best in any Bergman film at this point, utterly charming us with warmth, poignancy, and honest expressions of sexuality. Certainly though a large portion of this film’s humble beauty can be traced back to the sensitivity of his visual artistry, studying the expressive contours of the actors’ faces in close-up and gracefully traversing their city and island homes.

With the city’s infrastructure and rivers forming a backdrop to the early stages of Harry and Monika’s relationship, Bergman borrows a few neorealist qualities from the Italians, mounting pressures on both in their individual lives. The camera uneasily hides with a small child behind a wagon wheel as Monika’s father stumbles drunkenly from the local pub with his friends, and though he seems to be in a good mood for the moment, there is still suspense back home as his family carefully walks on eggshells. Slowly, the camera tracks to the side where it settles on Monika’s face anxiously anticipating an outburst – which of course arrives the moment she snaps at him to stop standing on her new shoes.

Meanwhile at Harry’s job, he is visually hemmed in by colleagues criticising his work ethic, and Bergman further crowds the shot with a handsomely constructed composition of glassware lined across its foreground. With the men around him dissipating, Harry’s decisive resignation in this moment feels truly freeing, even seeing him cheekily push one of those glasses off its shelf.

In the surrounding Swedish islands where both seek refuge, city views are replaced with rocky coastlines and oceans, turning this gorgeous rural scenery into their new home. There are plenty of long shots here that Bergman lavishes upon them, framing them within the gentle curve of seashores and atop a pier as they slow dance at dusk, and as he moves his camera closer, they are infused even more with their surroundings. Still landscapes are disrupted by their faces rapidly moving into the foreground, and their silhouetted reflections ripple in ponds like natural extensions of the environment.

Within the context of the 1950s, Andersson’s intermittent onscreen nudity was considered particularly transgressive, though within this ‘Paradise’ it also carries implications of an Adam and Eve-type fable, much like Summer Interlude from two years earlier. This is a romance that is allowed the time and space develop without external pressures, and Bergman’s close-ups of their faces resting against each other intimately expresses that delicate sentiment.

The appearance of Monika’s jealous ex-boyfriend to destroy their boat though effectively serves the same role as the allegorical snake, bringing moral corruption to the islands where they bask in their simple lives. Small arguments arise as time languidly drifts on, and soon they realise that their days of shirking responsibility are coming to an end. “We have to make something real out of our lives,” Harry ponders, though neither he nor Monika are particularly well-equipped to handle the soul-sucking drudgery of adulthood. Unlike the sudden deaths of previous Bergman melodramas, the downfall of these lovers simply comes through those rites of passage one must shoulder in a society of strict moral standards. Settling down, having babies, the woman staying home as the man goes to work – it is a contrived dynamic that they never had to consider as runaways, and which now wears away at their own self-identities, love, and happiness.

Divisions are drawn in the mise-en-scène as their quarrels turn into vicious arguments, and even the bars of their bed frame become oppressive visual obstructions when a fight turns into physical abuse. Yet amid such tragic conflict, Bergman still finds the time to hang on his empathetic close-ups, once capturing their tender love, though now only finding melancholy isolation. When Harry comes home and catches Monika in the middle of an affair, we don’t even get a reverse shot of what he is seeing, but instead we simply linger on his seething dismay. Later after they have separated and all their possessions are being carried out, he catches his own reflection in a mirror and almost seems to stare right at us, as Bergman dissolves into all the memories of their summer paradise.

Easily the strongest and most memorable shot from Summer with Monika is that which hangs on Andersson’s sad, prolonged gaze for over thirty seconds, letting her lock eyes with the camera while she slowly puffs on a cigarette. Though she is sitting in a club next to the man she is cheating with, she clearly feels no emotional investment in any of it, as Bergman gradually tracks in on her passive face and dims the background lighting into complete darkness where she is totally isolated. Jaunty jazz music keeps playing, but there is no joy to be found anymore. Bergman guarantees the loss of innocence in his characters’ lives as sure as seasonal changes, and it is in that contrast of light nostalgia against the demoralising fatigue of urban living where he sinks in a poignant recognition of what modern society has so cruelly stolen from its youth.

Summer with Monika is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.