Some of these women or others

I've mentioned a couple of times over the past few weeks that I seem to have a disproportionate number of silent movies and foreign films sitting on my DVR. One of the things this means is that I'll be doing a slightly greater proportion of posts on films from both of these genres than normal, since the one thing with the YouTube TV DVR is that stuff only stays on it for nine months. Thankfully, it looks like I've got foreign films in several different languages to do posts on, so it's not as if I'll be doing six Japanese films in a row. Having done Japanese and French films so far in August, it's time for one in Swedish: Ingmar Bergman's All These Women.

Jarl Kulle is the nominal star here, not the women; he plays Cornelius, a biographer and would-be composer. He had been hoping to do a biography of the famous cellist Felix (only seen from behind or from the neck down), but Felix screws up those plans by suddenly dropping dead. His body is laid out, and a bunch of women show up so that they can all comment on how Felix looks the same, and yet different.

Go back four days, as Cornelius shows up with a composition in hand that he hopes Felix can play, and hoping to get interviews with Felix to complete that biography he's been working on. Instead, he finds a bunch of women, all of whom seem to have had romantic dalliances with Felix at one point or another. Humlan (Bibi Andersson), the "Bumblebee" is Felix's mistress. Isolde (Harriet Andersson) is a maid at the estate. Adelaide (Eva Dahlbeck) is his wife; Mme. Tussaud (Karin Kavli) supports Felix financially; and Traviata is studying under Felix. The one other man in the movie is Jillker, who is Felix's agent and responsible for bookings and Felix's repertoire.

So, unable to talk to Felix, Cornelius tries to talk to everybody else, especially the women, to learn more about Felix. Cornelius has varying degrees of success, although things take a turn for the rather more dramatic when Humlan takes him to her bedroom, only for Traviata to show up and attack him for... reasons. It continues like this, with various errors for poor Cornelius as he tries to get that interview with Felix, until he's finally able to get Felix to play his piece at a chamber concert, only for Felix to drop dead just as he's about to start performing it.

As I was watching All These Women, I couldn't help but think of Citizen Kane. To me, somebody taking the idea of Citizen Kane in that a writer interviews the people who knew a famous man -- but then turning the movie into either a farce or a dark comedy -- is an idea that definitely has potential. Unfortunately, All These Women is not that movie. Several of the reviews I read seem to think that the reason All These Women doesn't work is that comedy was just not in Ingmar Bergman's wheelhouse, but I've seen Smiles of a Summer Night, and really enjoyed that one.

However, I do think Bergman's direction is part of the problem here. It feels almost as though he's directing kabuki theater, with the whole production way too stylized. I think it needed more of the stereotypical French sensibility of a man having a whole bunch of mistresses, but also to be filmed as something straightforward and, as much as this will probably tick some people, a more conventional filming and not arthouse.

All These Women had potential, but for whatever reason, Ingmar Bergman was not able to reach that potential.

Fanny and Alexander

Some months back TCM ran Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander in TCM Imports. Since it runs over three hours, I didn't get the time to sit and watch the whole thing until recently. But it's available on a pricey DVD from the Criterion Collection, so I can do a review on it here.

Alexander (Bertil Guve) and his kid sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) Ekdahl are children in a middle-class household in a Swedish city at the beginning of the 20th century (I don't think the exact year is given, but reference is made at the end to Strindberg's A Dream Play, which was written in 1901 but only first performed in 1907, so do the math). One year at Christmas, they attend a party given by their well-off grandmother, that seems as interminable as the wedding in The Deer Hunter.

At this party and its aftermath, we learn that things aren't as bright as they seem for everybody, asone of the uncles is carrying on a series of affairs, while another of the uncles is chronically in debt. Of course, none of this is going to matter in a little while as Fanny and Alexander's father Oscar (Allan Edwall) dies suddenly at the theater that's been in the family for generations and that he currently runs. Mom Emilie (Ewa Fröling) doesn't know what to do, so when the bishop Vergerus (Jan Malmsjö) who officiates at Oscar's wedding seems nice to her and the kids, she decides to marry him for security.

Mom couldn't have been more wrong, as the Bishop is extremely austere and expects everybody else to live the same way, and woe betide anybody who doesn't. Alexander, for one, can't live that way, as he has a vivid imagination which he has him believing he sees ghosts (I think; I didn't quite get what was going on until reading some reviews). Specifically, he claims that he saw the Bishop's first wife and children and that they told him a fantastic story of how badly the Bishop treated them, leading them to try to escape the house and winding up drowning in the nearby river. The Bishop punishes Alexander so badly that Emilie realizes she has to get the kids out of the house.

That's where Isak (Erland Josephson), a Jewish puppeteer who is also one of Grandma's lovers, comes in. He comes up with a ruse to get the kids out of the house and keep them at his place where the Bishop supposedly won't find them. Isak's house is odd, not just with the puppets but with mentally ill "son" Ismael (played by actress Stina Ekblad) having odd premonitions or something and understanding Alexander.

Frankly, I found Fanny and Alexander to be not my cup of tea at all. It's nicely photographed, but overlong and sprawling. I think a much better movie to be made out of the material would have ditched most of the Christmas party goings on and just used enough of it to establish Alexander's idyllic life before Dad dies and Mom remarries. It would also have been a reasonable length. However, since it's an Ingmar Bergman movie, there are a whole bunch of people who are going to praise it to high heaven. So watch and judge for yourself.

Winter Light

I've mentioned before that there are people who reflexively mark down foreign films on the grounds that they tend to be pretentious. I don't think that's necessarily the case as much as the fact that the foreign films we get are a small portion of other countries' output, and the critics and arthouse owners whose opinions drive what foreign films get screened tend to have a rather different point of vew from the average viewer. A good example of this is Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light.

Gunnar Björndtstand plays Tomas Ericsson, a Lutheran paster in a small rural parish in western Sweden. He's got a small and dwindling congregation, and for the most part he seems to be going through the motions. After the current Sunday service, he talks about celebrating the liturgy at the other church in the parish. But first he has to deal with a couple of people coming to see him.

One is Märta (Ingrid Thulin). She's a teacher at the local school, and ever since Tomas' wife died some years back, she's had the hots for him, somehow thinking he needs a woman to take care of him and love him. The other is a couple, fisherman Jonas (Max von Sydow) and his wife Karin (Gunnel Lindblom). Karin is worried about her husband because he's become discouraged after seeing what the modern world has become, specifically with China's push to acquire nuclear weapons.

Tomas tries to comfort Jonas, but he realizes that God is silent and that he doesn't have the words to comfort anybody any more. It's a distressing fact for Tomas, and it certainly doesn't help Jonas and Karin. So Jonas responds by shooting himself in the head. Märta now feels more than ever that Tomas needs her smothering love.

I hope you can tell by my synopsis that I didn't particularly care for this movie. The big thing is that I found all of the characters to be people whom I at best didn't care about, and at worse actively hated, and not in the hissable way a good movie villain can be hated. Winter Light is the sort of movie that doesn't have any villains. Märta is the worst, though, in that I found her clingy and controlling to the point that I wanted Tomas to push her aside.

Still, Winter Light is the sort of movie that all the people who write reviews for IMDB and other places just love. It's available on a pricey Criterion Collection DVD (actually, I think part of a box set), so if you want to judge for yourself, you can.

Thursday Movie Picks #183: Once Was Enough -- Movies I have no desire to see a second time

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of "Thursday Movie Picks", the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "Once Was Enough", meaning movies that we saw once and don't really want to see a second time due to the difficult nature of them. It's too bad I used Under the Volcano six months ago, because that's one I'd love to use in this challenge. But it turns out I was able to come up with three movies from the 1970s to use in this challenge:

Cries and Whispers (1973). Harriet Andersson plays a woman dying of cancer in Sweden around 1900, and looking after her now that her final days are here are her two sisters (Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann). The family dynamic is screwed up, and all three sisters have flashbacks as to why that might be. One of the sisters cuts her vagina with a piece of glass. Seriously. It goes on like this. Ingmar Bergman directed with an extremely red palette.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). Paul Newman plays the famous hanging judge who was the "only law west of the Pecos" as a complete jerk who makes the TV judges of today look like nice people. It doesn't help that John Huston got self-indulgent later in his career, and this is one of the more self-indulgent of Huston's movies that I've seen.

An Unmarried Woman (1978). Jill Clayburgh plays a modern urban woman who one day is divorced by her husband (Michael Murphy) because he's having a mid-life crisis and wants another woman. She tries to put her life back together, seeing a shrink and meeting another man (Alan Bates). I was about six when this came out and remember thinking back then that it sounded like such a sophisticated movie. Then I grew up and watched it and found out I was most definitely not in the target demographic. I had no desire to hear Clayburgh's character talk about getting her first period.

Såsom i en spegel

So I watched Through a Glass Darkly off my DVR. It's available on DVD as part of a pricey three-movie Ingmar Bergman set courtesy of the Criterion Collection. I'm glad I've knocked it off my list of to-see movies, but I don't know that I'd spend Criterion Collection money on it. I didn't realize when I watched it that Bergman Week begins tomorrow.

The movie starts off with a bunch of people getting out of the water after going for a swim. It turns out that those four people are the only characters in the movie. Karin (Harriet Andersson) is married to Martin (Max von Sydow), and is visiting her father David (Gunnar Björnstrand) and younger brother Minus (Lars Passgård) at the family's summer house on the island of Fårö, off the northern coast of Gotland, the largest island in the Baltic Sea.

Everything seems happy at first, but we quickly realize that there's a lot going on beneath the surface. Karin just got out of the hospital. In fact, it was a mental hospital, and there's the question of whether she's truly cured of her disease, which I don't think the movie openly names but is presumably schizophrenia. Minus is a teenager and going through what nowadays would be considered teen angst. And neither child has as good a relationship with their father as they'd like. Dad is an author who is commercially successful but who feels artistically blocked. Dad goes off to the rest of Europe for various work-related reasons, leaving the kids alone -- you wonder who's taking care of Minus all this time.

Karin starts to act just strangely enough that it's easy to wonder whether this is a relapse. Eventually, she finds her father's diary and reads it, finding out that her schizophrenia is most likely incurable, and that Dad is nuts enough that he wants to chronicle the course of the disease. Minus continues to feel unappreciated. And Karin's behavior continues to become even more erratic.

There's not much action in this movie, but a lot of talk. And talk. And more talk when they're done talking. Frankly, I found it all to be the sort of psychological mumbo-jumbo that people who like to pan foreign movies as being "pretentious" would probably find stereotypical. That having been said, this one isn't anywhere near as bad as Bergman's later Cries and Whispers which I reviewed here some months back. The black-and-white cinematography is also lovely, stark at times and making me want to visit Gotland to see it in living color. (Fårö was a military zone closed to foreigners during the Cold War but is apparently open now.) Ingmar Bergman liked the area so much that he eventually moved there, dying on the island in 2007.

If you're a fan of Bergman, you'll probably enjoy Through a Glass Darkly. If not, I'd suggest starting with something conventional like The Seventh Seal.

Cries and Whispers

I mentioned yesterday that one of the movies I watched over the weekend, Will Penny, seems to be out of print on DVD. Another movie that I watched which is in print on DVD is Cries and Whispers. It's a pricey DVD, though, since it's courtesy of the Criterion collection.

Harriet Andersson plays Agnes, one of three sisters in circa-1900 Sweden. At the star of the movie, she's in bed, and apparently in some pain. That's because she is in fact dying of cancer, which of course was an early death sentence back in those days, as with James Stewart's character in The Shootist. For some time, Agnes has been looked after at the old family estate by the maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), but not that her death is getting closer, her two systers Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann) are there as well. What a nice family thing to do.

Yeah, right. This is one dysfunctional family. The sisters all apparently hate each other, but none of them mention any of it to each other. Each of the three sisters gets to have a flashback about something in her past that made her the way she is today. For Agnes, she apparently had some sort of distant relationship with her mother (also played by Liv Ullmann), which I suppose should be a bit creepy, but I didn't notice when I was watching that Ullmann was doing both parts.

Maria seems the most normal, but when she was younger she had a thing for the family doctor, and even though she's since gotten married she still has a thing for the doctor, even though he doesn't find the feeling mutual. In fact, the good doctor shows Maria how she's changed over the years. Maria also some hang-ups about wanting to help people, whether it be her sister Agnes, or her husband.

And then there's Karin. She doesn't like to be touched. She's emotionally cold, even though she too is married. And then one night when she was having dinner with her husband, she accidentally broke a wine glass, and kept one of the shards as a souvenir of how everything is a web of lies, at least in her mind. You don't want to know what happens to that piece of glass.

Agnes finally dies, but no, that's not the end of the movie. Not by a mile. There's a bizarre dream-like sequence involving Anna and Agnes, and Anna wanting everybody to see Agnes again even though Agnes is quite dead.

When people talk about foreign films as being pretentious, I'd think Cries and Whispers is a good place to start. The movie is tedious, the characters extremely unlikeable. And then there's the cinematography. The interiors, I think, deservedly won an Oscar, aided by Sven Nykvist's excellent use of lighting. However, Ingmar Bergman had the idea that everything should be red. Boy does that color dominate. The only good thing about the overwhelming use of red is that at least the movie's color palette isn't teal and orange like most modern movies.

If you want to see all of Ingmar Bergman's work, go ahead an knock yourself out by watching Cries and Whispers. If you want to see Bergman discussing family dysfunction, I think you'd be better starting out with Autumn Sonata.

Bergman Week

So I missed this year's Bergman Week, a look at the life and work of Ingmar Bergman held at his estate on the southern Swedish island of Fårö. I didn't realize it was going on until I heard a Radio Sweden report on this year's edition. The Radio Sweden piece isn't available by itself, but only as part of the full broadcast of Friday's show. That MP3 is about 27MB and will be available for another four weeks. This year being the centenary of the other Bergman, the Bergman Week looked quite a bit at the film the two Bergmans made together, Autumn Sonata.

Speaking of that other Bergman, Radio Sweden had a report on her, but this one is only a print report. (On the bright side, I don't think the print archives are limited the way the audio archives are. Apparently, somebody is planning to make a movie about Ingrid Bergman's romance with photographer Robert Capa, and pre-production is proceeding apace. No idea if it will ultimately be made, or when it will show up in theaters.

Smiles of a Summer Night

Several months ago, TCM had a night of Ingmar Bergman movies programmed, and I was looking forward to doing a full-length post on Smiles of a Summer Night. But then James Garner (I think it was him) died, and TCM came up with a 24-hour tribute that pre-empted the night of Bergman movies. That night has been rescheduled, and the Ingmar Bergman movies are on TCM tonight, starting at 8:00 PM with Smiles of a Summer Night, which is the subject of today's post.

Gunnar Björnstrand plays Fredrik, a successful attorney at the turn of the last century. He's middle-aged with an adult son Henrik (Bjön Bjelvenstam), who was the product of his first marriage. But Fredrik's first wife died some time in the past, and Fredrik has taken a new wife in the form of the very young Anne (Ulla Jacobsson). So far, so good; all of this is normal as life happens. But unfortunately, both of our male protagonists seem to have a problem with sex. Dad, for whatever reason, has never been able to consummate his marriage to his now not-so-new wife, while the son is studying for the priesthood which has apparently left him sexually repressed.

Dad goes off to the theater, where he sees star actress Desiree (Eva Dahlbeck). It turns out that he's been having an affair with Eva, which might have something to do with why he hasn't ben able to consummate his marriage to Anne. And let's just say that things aren't even that simple. Desiree has been having a relationship with Fredrik, but it turns out that he's not the only one. She's also having a relationship with Count Malcolm (Jarl Kulle), and when the Count finds out that another maa is having a dalliance with his Desiree, the Count isn't going to be happy. Not that the Count should have much to complain about, since he's already married to the Countess (Margit Carlqvist) and probably shouldn't be having that affair with Desiree either.

What's a person to do in the face of all these love triangles? Desiree gets a brilliant idea. There's an old country house that the family has owned, and Desiree, realizing that nobody seems to be happy with the the one they're with and would be better off pairiung up with somebody else, invites everybody to that country house, where she'll work on pairing everybody up properly. It sounds daft, but this is where the movie starts to get fun. Fredrik and Henrik come; the Count and Countess arrive, and with the help of a couple of servants we've got enough for four couples, or at least three couples and Desiree. Will everybody wind up with the person most appropriate for them? Shenanigans abound as the various people temporarily couple and decouple on the way to being with whicever partner they'll have at the end.

Smiles of a Summer Night is aa film that can be a lot of fun, although the plot can be a bit complicated to follow what with multiple couples all in states of flux. Thankfully, director Bergman's steady hand guides us through the proceedings, giving us a rewarding journey, and a film that's lovely to look at at times. Although the film starts off a bit slowly, it really picks up, especially once the action hits the country house. It's also lighter than the later Bergman movies that I've seen (although there are several I still haven't seen), so if you've been put off Bergman before, Smiles of a Summer Night might not be a bad place to start.

Mothers' Day with Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman (r.) with Liv Ullmann in Autumn Sonata

Not everybody can have a perfect relationship with their parents. In honor of those who had a difficult relationship with Mom, one could do far worse than to watch Autumn Sonata. It's not on TCM's Mothers' Day schedule, unsurprisingly, but it has been released to DVD and Blu-ray courtesy of the Criterion collection.

The movie starts off at a parsonage somewhere in rural Norway. Viktor (Halvar Björk) is watching his wife Eva (Liv Ullmann) writing a letter to her mother, and giving us some expository opening voiceover about what Eva is like: a tender, sensitive woman who, it seems, has made some sacrifices to take on the role of a pastor's wife. The purpose of the letter that Eva is writing is to invite Mom Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) to visit them at the parsonage for a little while. Mom is a concert pianist who has travelled the world, but has recently lost her long-time partner after an extended illness. (It's implied that Dad died some time in the past; it's perfectly normal to fall in love again and this relationship isn't supposed to be scandalous.) At any rate, Mom needs a break, and a little time at the parsonage might do her some good.

The only thing is, Viktor is asking Eva whether she's sure she wants to do this. Obviously, that means there must be some good reason why she wouldn't want to do it. And we begin to get hints of why. Charlotte can be a bit demanding, although some of it isn't out of place for an artist; besides, she's getting up there in years and some of the initial complaints could just be those of old age. That is, until Eva springs an unwelcome surprise on Mom: Eva's got her sister and Charlotte's other daughter Helena (Lena Nyman) with them. Helena is suffering from some neurological condition that's never specified, although I'd guess the late stages of multiple sclerosis, as it's left Helena unable to walk and her speech very difficult to understand. Charlotte hasn't seen Helena in years, as though she basically abandoned her own daughter when the daughter got sick.

Charlotte tries to be polite, but things continue to deteriorate in ways big and small. In one of the best scenes, Eva tells her mother that she plays the organ at the church, even giving a concert at one point, and has been working on the Chopin preludes. So Mom asks her to play one of them for her, which Eva does. Charlotte, sitting alongside Eva on the piano bench then proceeds to pick up the sheet music, put it aside, and put the piano music stand down. It's a small sign that Mom is an expert: like all good concert pianists, she doesn't need the sheet music. Daughter, however, does, and Mom's emphasizing this is a subtle but unmistakeable humiliation. Let's just say that after this, things are going to get far worse between them.

Autumn Sonata is a difficult movie. It's absolutely not the sort of movie that you'd just want to sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch. I wouldn't even call it a date movie, as it's too heavy for that. But it's an outstanding movie that contains excellent performances from both Bergman and Ullmann; Ingrid Bergman received an Oscar nomination for their work here and Ullmann really should have. Director Ingmar Bergman does a wonderful job as well, deftly navigating between flashbacks and the present day, while making a film that's visually lovely to look at, even if it is about a relationship that's gone really ugly. (This has nothing to do with the Norwegian countryside which does show up a bit and is of course beautiful; the interiors that make up much of the movie are quite good.) Despite the heavy nature of the subject matter here, Autumn Sonata is one you absolutely should see.