Tag: Gunnel Lindblom

Scenes From a Marriage (1974)

Bergman’s compelling, emotionally charged film is an intense, impressive and surprising tale

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Liv Ullman (Marianne), Erland Josephson (Johan), Bibi Andersson (Katarina), Jan Malmsjö (Peter), Gunnel Lindblom (Eva), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Mrs Jacobi), Anita Wall (Journalist)

A loving couple sit with an interviewer to discuss how happy their relationship is. Ten years later, years after their divorce, they meet in their old weekend cottage for an assignation away from their new partners. Along the way, they’ll lie, fight, cheat but also show time-and-again few people know them better than they do each other. Based on his own marriages and relationships (not least his relationship with Liv Ullman), Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage is a fascinatingly intimate and intense portrait of the contradictory impulses we feel towards the people we know best: how we can, in the same moment, love them, hate them, want to be a million miles away from them and also yearn to take them in our arms and tell them everything.

Skilfully cut down from a six-part TV series – the episode titles become ‘chapter headings’, each signifying a time shift – it becomes a series of intense, almost real-time, conversations between middle-brow professor Johan (Erland Josephson) and successful lawyer Marianne (Liv Ullman). From their ten-year anniversary, their happy-but-functional relationship is shattered when Johan leaves for the (unseen) Paula, heading into divorce, Marianne’s growth in sexual confidence, her little acts of revenge over Johan and their later affair. At all times they prove capable of ripping emotional wounds into each other, but also remaining strangely dependent on love and affection from each other.

It would be easy to say that Scenes of a Marriage is a theatrical piece – it came, originally, from a play Bergman was working on and well over two thirds of its running time features Josephson and Ullman alone on screen. But if the close-up is the language of cinema, Scenes from a Marriage may be the most cinematic film every made. Shot in a cooly observational style by Sven Nykvist, vast swathes of Scenes from a Marriage plays out in searing close-up, the camera studying every inch of the emotional angst its two characters are putting themselves through. Bergman knows exactly how to build the punishing tension in these scenes, frequently climaxing in visceral outbursts.

It is a film about what we say and what we chose not to say and what we decide to hear. The conversation between the couples is framed by their careful considerations: when to hold fire and when to let rip; when to listen and when to choose not to hear. And it’s clear that, when we are first introduced to them, they have mastered the art of not saying anything at all. Smilingly parroting cliches to their interviewer, they later smugly compare themselves to their feuding friends Karatina and Peter (excellent cameos from a searing Bibi Andersson and a provocative Jan Malmsjö). But their conversation never touches on deeper issues (Bergman’s called this chapter ‘The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Carpet’) and their sex life has dwindled to timetabled functionality.

It’s clear they are aware of this growing distance themselves. Johan shares his poetry with a colleague (an expertly reserved cameo from Gunnel Lindblom), complaining Marianne considers it little better than spiritual masturbation and yearns for an expressive freedom he feels is impossible in his marriage. Marianne meanwhile speaks to a client, Mrs Jacobi (a tragic Barbro Hiort af Ornäs), whose story of a lifetime trapped in a loveless marriage with children she never really wanted clearly strikes Marianne as a chilling vision of her own future.

That doesn’t stop Marianne responding with shocked subservience that tips into desperate pleading when Johan announces he wants to leave her. Bergman stages this scene beautifully, with the ridiculous logic people sink into in tragic break-ups. Johan eats a snack meal prepared by Marianne, guiltily confessing his affair, but there is something very real about Marianne’s stunned reaction which sees her planning his packing (because he’s useless at it) and continue their bedtime preparation before she starts pleading him to stay. Just there is something very real in Johan’s reaction: having steeled himself for a fight, her subservience enrages him until he is cruelly tearing verbal lumps out of her. This is the sort of searing emotional up-and-down that rings true, one allowing shock to humiliate them the other transforming shame into defensive, accusatory blame.

But Scenes from a Marriage is a film that utterly understands how much we change under circumstances. Separation is not good for Johan: his new lover doesn’t interest him, his career stalls and he tips into self-pity. Marianne, once the shock and fear of separation passes, discovers she likes her freedom. Her wardrobe shifts to more form-fitting and revealing clothes, she embraces the opportunities of singledom and repays Johan’s desertion with a seduction of him she deliberately doesn’t follow-through on. They now talk more honestly than ever before – and it’s a blistering, verbally and physically violent exchange rammed full of resentment and petty cruelty.

To do this stuff you need actors at the top of their game and who completely trust each other. Bergman certainly has this with his two stars. Josephson’s self-contented smugness moves through arrogant selfishness to desperate vulnerability, his expressive face sometimes puppy-doggish, sometimes drowning in bear-like fury. Ullman is, of course, exceptional. Her masterful ability to react, to let thoughts and emotions play fleetingly across her face was made for Bergman’s close-up film-making and she takes Marianne on a fascinating journey, from near-submissive home-maker to vibrantly confident women of the world while never letting the vulnerability and doubt be too far from her eyes. It’s an extraordinary performance, searing and tender, as raw as knife-edge.

These two play absorbingly off each other, their conversations gripping minefields of repressed then hugely expressed emotions. Their collaboration, guided by Bergman’s close (but not intrusive) camerawork is extraordinary. Fashioned from Bergman’s experiences of relationships, Scenes from a Marriage is, however, strangely hopeful. One of its key themes is that, even when they hate each other, this couple know and trust each other more than anyone else. In times of crisis and pain they always turn to each for a consolatory word or comfort.

There is something strangely warm about their relationship, despite its turmoil, and the film is refreshing in saying friendship and love doesn’t have to end with divorce, but can transform itself into something else, perhaps even something better. Perhaps it’s that strange note of hope that makes Scenes of a Marriage so influential to a generation of filmmakers. It refuses the simple moral standpoints of judgement and suggests the decision to no longer be together (or even faithful to each other) need not be the end all, but instead a bump in a longer journey: that a relationship (and even a love) doesn’t end when a marriage does.

The Silence (1963)

Bergman’s third film in his “faith” trilogy, is an intriguing Sartresque puzzle

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Ingrid Thulin (Ester), Gunnel Lindblom (Anna), Jörgen Lindström (Johan), Birger Malmstein (Waiter), Håkan Jahnberg (Hotel porter)

Two sisters, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), mother to ten-year-old Johan (Jörgen Lindström), are travelling home on a train through Europe. Ester, a translator, is already ill and her health takes a sharp downturn, leading to the group being forced to rest in a hotel in a town called Timoka, in an unnamed (fictional) European country. Anna resents what she sees as the judgemental expectations of her older sister and sees her obligation to care for her as a burden. Over a few days in the hotel, the two sisters move awkwardly around each other, avoiding addressing their problems while struggling in a country where neither of them speak the language.

The Silence was the third, and final, film in Bergman’s loose thematic trilogy on the absence of God in the modern world. It’s also possibly his most bleak and Sartre influenced work so far, a film of oppressive silence (devoid of music, the only noises coming from objects in the rooms of the hotel) with events occurring in a disturbing, slightly surreal world, where the normal rules of human interaction seem to be hold. Perhaps that’s because the characters move, like ghosts, through a world where they have no ability to communicate other than stumbled words and hand gestures, residing in a hotel where there seems to be no timescale on how long they are (or have been) there.

It also feels like an entrée to Persona, Bergman’s next major work. Like that, The Silence revolves around a symbiotic relationship between two women, who together seem to form two halves of one personality. Esther is intellectual, reserved but also vulnerable and adrift, dependent on others for help and frequently resorting to drink to dull her pain. Anna is more earthy, sensual but insecure, resentful and feels judged by others, finding temporary peace in casual sexual encounters. Both sisters are locked in a relationship that feels both disconnected and mutually dependent, constantly clashing with each other but living in worlds defined by their feelings for the other.

They are played majestically by two performers at the height of their powers. Thulin seems cold but conveys great depths of pain and suffering beneath what seems like her confidence and assurance. Thulin’s expressive face communicates great emotional turmoil, even with only the slightest movements and gestures. It’s a beautifully delivered performance of a woman who is unknowable, distant, difficult but also highly sympathetic. Lindblom’s physical assurance is counter-balanced by the great uncertainty she manages to communicate in every beat of Anna’s life. Her general demeanour of icy chill, interrupted with emotional breakdowns which alternate rage with tears and hysterical laughter, is faultlessly delivered.

These two characters increasingly feel trapped inside a world where they can’t easily communicate, with the threat of turmoil constantly rumbling on the margins. This unnamed country teeters on the edge of war – tanks and other military equipment make constant intrusions on the streets and the train tracks and the rumble of planes can be heard in the air. They are also rendered increasingly mute and isolated by their inability to speak the language. Communication with people around them is impossible and understanding is only fractured.

This is where Bergman’s views on God slowly take their form. For, as he observed in other films in the trilogy, what is this world but one where we strain in vain for the voice of God? Isn’t that like being adrift in a country where the language is unknown? And if, as Bergman so heartily expresses elsewhere, God is love what does it mean that this film revolves around character who have such negative to indifferent opinions on others. Ester may love – as she argues – Anna, but Anna has interpreted this love as smothering and oppressive her whole life and rejects Anna utterly. Anna seems disinterested in her son Johan (who Ester yearns to be closer to, but can never quite find the way to close the gap) and impatient with her sister. Not only are the characters trapped in a world of silence, they are also trapped in circles of loveless relationships.

It’s striking then that this was Bergman’s most sexual film so far. Bizarrely – for a film as austere, glum and challenging as The Silence – it was a box-office hit. This was, in large part, connected to its comfort with sex scenes. Anna watches a couple sat next to her having passionate (and beautifully lit) sex in an opera house, before engaging in wordless (of course) intercourse with a waiter (Anna even mentions the benefits of the man not understanding a word she says). The more frustrated Ester masturbates alone – no coincidence that she later speaks of her disgust with the sexual act and its bodily fluids. This is a film without love but with a lot of base, meaningless, carnal love in it – all part of a Godless world leaning into its nihilistic close.

The Silence is extraordinary in its filmic confidence. It’s exquisitely shot by Sven Nykvist, his camera (far more mobile than almost any time before in Bergman) tracks down corridors and through rooms of its luxurious but chillingly empty hotel (you can see The Silence’s influence on Kubrick’s The Shining). It uses light, shade and shadow in strikingly meaningful ways, arcs of light suggesting a host of underlying emotions and unspoken longings.

The Silence is a film that invites analysis and theorising, partially because its characters speak in such gnomic, Bergmanesque mysteries. Some have theorised Johan is in fact Ester’s child, raised begrudgingly by Anna, now longed for by his real mother at her end. Some have suggested Ester and Anna are such contrasting sides they may in fact be the same person (traces of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive) others see an incestuous longing in Ester for her sister. Bergman increases the unknowing mystery by presenting much of the film from the perspective of the precocious (not many children read Turgenov) but innocent Johan, a child who sees but cannot interrogate the actions around him.

It makes The Silence feel like a bridge from one era of Bergman to the next. The last hurrah of his spiritual study, before a series of films that would explore the interconnected lives of women whose desires, needs and dependencies motivate and merge into each other. That makes it a fascinating and vital milestone in Bergman’s development – as well as another extraordinary, haunting and fascinating work from a great director.

Winter Light (1963)

Faith is thoughtfully questioned in Ingmar Bergman’s spare, bleak and striking masterpiece

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Gunnar Björnstrand (Pastor Tomas Ericsson), Ingrid Thulin (Märta Lundberg), Gunnel Lindblom (Karin Persson), Max von Sydow (Jonas Persson), Allan Edwall (Algot Frövik), Kolbjörn Knudsen (Knut Aronsson), Olof Thunberg (Fredrik Blom), Elsa Ebbesen (Magdalena Ledfors)

It would surprise many to hear Bergman held Winter Light in the highest regard among his films. An austere chamber piece, largely set in a cold, naturally lit church, it’s the middle chapter of his thematic trilogy on faith and it serves to correct any sense of hope left remaining from in Through a Glass Darkly. Winter Light – with its lead character a semi-biographical combination of Bergman’s father (himself a Lutheran Pastor) and Bergman himself – begins with a robotic preaching in a Church and ends firing up another such sermon to an empty Church. This is a world where, if there ever was a God, he has long since gone silent and disappeared over the horizon.

You could argue Tomas Ericsson is the most ill-suited priest in the history of cinema. He’s played with a peevish, grumpy lack of hope, inspiration or joy, self-loathing seeping from every pore by Gunnar Björnstrand in what might just be his finest hour. Björnstrand, more comfortable with comedy, struggled with this counter-casting (and his cold, which was written into the script), the bottled-up pressure of the role almost shattering his friendship with Bergman. Following a single afternoon in Ericsson’s life, Winter Light charts his complete disillusionment with his faith, his utter failure to provide spiritual comfort to parishioners and his mix of dependence, indifference and contempt for schoolteacher and some-time lover Märta (Ingrid Thulin), herself a needy, unhappy woman content to play second-fiddle to Tomas’ deceased wife.

Tomas’ faith in God has long since vanished. Winter Light is his own Gethsemane, a parade of painful events and conversations where he waits desperately for some sort of sign or word from the Almighty and is left instead wondering, like Christ, why God has forsaken him. Tomas has become bitter, self-obsessed and self-loathing, going through the motions with a dwindling congregation and unable to muster even the faintest bit of belief in the words that pass his lips.

Winter Light follows up ideas of Through a Glass Darkly (Tomas even talks of a “Spider God”, a destructive force at the centre of a world made of pain). There is an echo throughout of the idea that, if God is love, then letting love into your life (or acknowledging the existence of Love in the world) is proof enough that there is a God, even if he is now silent. If so, Tomas’ rejection of any form of love goes hand-in-hand with his rejection of faith. If he felt love, it was for his late wife – and her death matches the decease of his faith in God. Now he angrily slaps away offers of affection with the same contempt he addresses towards questions of faith.

That offer of love comes from Märta, a mousey teacher trapped under an unflattering hat, the bags under her eyes and spinsterish clothes. She’s played in a performance of sustained, emotive brilliance by Ingrid Thulin. Märta captures her feelings for Tomas – right down to her acknowledgement that she knows he does not love her – in a sprawling, stream-of-consciousness letter (which Tomas has delayed reading – and when he does, he scrunches it into a frustrated ball).

That letter is conveyed to us in a stunning, almost interrupted, seven-minute take where Bergman focuses the camera on Thulin in close-up who delivers the contents of the letter straight to camera. This is a tour-de-force from Thulin, by terms unblinking, honest, self-denying, pained, resigned, hopeful and frustratingly simpering, a masterclass that marks one of Winter Light’s most striking moments of directorial and actorly technique. Few actors could pull this scene off with the grace and emotional commitment Thulin brings to it – and still leave us understanding why Tomas later, with anger frustration, cruelly tells her he has simply had enough of her all-forgiving love.

There is no place for that sort of saintly, Christ-like, love in Tomas’ life. His focus remains his own self-loathing. When meeting with Jonas (Max von Sydow – even more carved from granite than normal, his fixed stillness contrasted with Björnstrand’s twitchy unease), who has come to Tomas for spiritual reassurance to help overcome suicidal thoughts, Tomas can only complain of his own lack of faith. Tomas fails utterly to offer any solace to Jonas, a further mark of his own failure as both a priest and human. Jonas’ suicidal misery at the dread of oncoming Armageddon in the nuclear age, becomes grist to Tomas’ own misery and our priest in turn feels no shame in turning to Märta immediately for reassurance and comfort.

The only person who seems to have considered the nature of faith is disabled sexton Algot (a marvellous performance by Allan Edwall). Algot reflects that the suffering on the cross was not Christ’s true sacrifice – after all that was over in hours. The real suffering was hearing God’s silence on that cross, of the horror of suddenly thinking your life’s work may have been a waste of time, that he evangelised for someone silent or indifferent or worse. It would tie in directly with Tomas’ own doubts – except it’s pretty certain Tomas isn’t listening to him.

Maybe that’s partly the problem. We don’t listen to God, because we no longer expect him to talk. At one point, Tomas asks why God has fallen silent while behind him light suddenly pours through the Church window. Is that a sign of a sort? If it is Tomas doesn’t look and when he does, he doesn’t think. Instead, he contributes to the silence of God – as the closest thing to his vessel he fails to listen, fails to help and focuses only on his own pain.

Winter Light is a gorgeous film, full of striking light and shade by cinematographer Sven Nykvist. It’s also a bleak, grim, hopeless film, the best hope it can offer being God might have been real but he’s long since turned his back on us, just as we’ve turned out back on him. It’s magnified when we reject the thing he might have left for us, love itself. Winter Light is intensely thought-provoking, but rivetingly intelligent in the way the best of Bergman is. Björnstrand is superb and Thulin is extraordinary, in a film that carries worlds of meanings in its spare 80 minute runtime.

The Virgin Spring (1960)

Revenge, violence but also a touch of hope abound in Bergman’s haunting Oscar winning classic

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Max von Sydow (Töre), Birgitta Valberg (Märeta), Gunnel Lindblom (Ingeri), Birgitta Pettersson (Karin), Axel Düberg (Thin Herdsman), Tor Isedal (Mute Herdsman), Axel Slangus (Bridge-keeper), Allan Edwall (Beggar), Ove Porath (Boy)

Spoilers: If you can spoil a Bergman classic, the full content of the film is discussed below

If a film cemented Bergman as the master of misery, it was his Oscar-winning The Virgin Spring. On the surface, a grim fable of rape revenge shot in wintery horror, it’s hard to imagine most people nerving themselves to watch it based on a synopsis. But they would be missing out. The Virgin Spring is, for all its hard-hitting violence and cruelty, a surprisingly hopeful film. Like the best of Bergman, it’s profoundly challenging, searching and operates on multiple levels – but rewards the viewer with splashes of strange optimism that feel a world away when it opens. It’s one of his truly great films.

Set in medieval Sweden, Töre (Max von Sydow, magnificently, chillingly grief-stricken) is a prosperous and devotional Christian farmer, in a cooling marriage to Märeta (Birgitta Valberg). The light of his life is his daughter, the beautiful Karin (Birgitta Pettersson). One day, Töre tasks Karin to travel to the Church (half a day’s ride) to deliver some candles. She travels with Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom – bitter, damaged and brilliant), a pagan servant girl, heavily pregnant and resentful. Along the way they two are separated and Karin meets with three peasant brothers in the forest, who share her meal with her before the two adult brothers (Axel Düberg, Tor Isedal) rape and murder her. The brothers walk on and take shelter that night in Töre’s hall. When he discovers their deed, he murders them all (even the innocent youngest brother, a boy) then, horrified, pleads to God for forgiveness. At which point a spring, bursts forth where Karin was killed.

Not exactly a bundle of laughs. But this is powerful, compelling film-making from Bergman. His influence on horror has been overlooked, but The Virgin Spring show how much he inspired everything from shlock to The Exorcist. This is a tense, unbearably so, film which twice draws out the long build-up to shocking violence in a way that would make Sergio Leone proud. Played out in a beautifully moody, bleakly cold and wintery visual style from Sven Nykvist (his first collaboration with Bergman) and often in an atmospheric mix of silence and natural sound, you can feel your stomach knot as the inevitable transgressive act looms ever closer.

The film pulls no punches, while never being exploitative. The rape and murder of Karin (excellently played with just the right mix of innocence and spoilt certainty by Birgitta Pettersson) unfolds with a cold matter-of-factness, as she slowly realises these men are far more dangerous than she imagined. The event is hard-to-watch for its simplicity rather than its graphicness, and for the cold indifference of its perpetrators who act on a whim. It takes place almost in silence and the killing (mercifully off-camera) is more because they don’t know what to do next. Mix that in with the terrified stares of Ingeri from afar, and the shell-shock of the younger brother (who vainly tries to bury Karin with dirt before running away), makes a scene devoid of sensationalism but terrible to watch.

It’s reflected in the film’s later act of violence. The brothers having tried to pass off Karin’s blood-stained dress as their (imaginary) sister’s, sell it to Märeta (who instantly recognises a garment she stitched herself, even as she’s asked to admire the handiwork), are locked in the hall while they sleep. Töre’s slaying of them, however, never feels triumphant. Instead, the Christian Töre abandons his faith to embrace pagan revenge. Like a priest before a blood sacrifice he dresses himself in butchery gear, discards a sword for a smaller knife, carefully prepares the room for the brothers to wake and then sits, idol-like, in his chair waiting. This is a damning ritualistic insight into how our faith – the faith Töre was so proud of – can drop away to reveal our vengeful simplicity below.

The fight that ensues feels like something from the nether-regions of hell. One brother is skewered, arms wide, to Töre’s chair. Another is stabbed under Töre’s body weight – shot in a way reminiscent of Karin’s rape, with the flames of the fire dancing between them and the camera – his body left to burn in the fire. Their brother – a child – runs to Märeta for protection, yet Töre hurls him against the wall breaking his neck. There is no triumph. Töre speaks not a word – the brothers die having no idea who he is. Töre is left starring at his trembling hands in shock, as if waking from a dream not recognising the man he has become who turned his back on every article of faith he held dear.

It’s a film that shows the impact of grief and trauma. From the terrified face of the youngest brother – shovelling dirt on a dead body with tear-stained eyes – to Töre’s shell-shocked realisation his daughter is dead. Deep down, people blames themselves. Märeta believes she is being punished for envying Karin’s closeness to her father. Ingeri believes she has cursed Karin to suffer the same shame as her. Töre, perhaps, feels guilt at his own semi-incestuous closeness with his daughter. Why else does he struggle to bring down with his bare hands a new-planted birch tree (in beautifully haunting medium shot), cutting branches from it to flay himself in a sauna before he takes his revenge? It’s both punishment for past and future sins.

This is also a film that challenges us to decide whether brutal revenge is justified. The build-up to the murder of the brothers is very similar to the murder of Karin. A long meal, shared, even with similar food – so similar that the innocent younger brother vomits at the memories it brings back. This young boy is the death of innocence in this world. Betrayed into crime by his vile elders then forced to pay a terrible price for a deed he was powerless to stop and left him deeply distressed. How can we really triumph in Töre’s killing, when we see it performed so violently at such a price?

Bergman tests throughout how far faith goes, and questions what power God has. The film opens with two pleas, to two very different Gods. Ingeri pleads to Odin to punish the virtuous Karin, who in Ingeri’s eyes is a working rebuke for her wedlock-free pregnancy. Töre prays to a Dürer style carved cross for God to keep their household safe. Only one deity delivers: and rightly Töre will plead at the film’s end “You see it God, you see it…you allowed it. I don’t understand you.” Töre has even mirrored the rapists, in murdering an innocent. He repents later, but is a heathen in the moment.

Paganism is strong in The Virgin Spring. But it is not good. Ingeri separates from Karin when she meets a half-blind bridge-keeper, in a house full of ravens, in the wood. The man ticks every box for representing Odin and conveys dark promises of powers beyond mankind. But he is a vile, Devilish figure who takes an impish delight in cruelty and mischief. Ingeri’s departure from him coincides with Karin’s encounter with her killers – as if these demonic sprites had been conjured up by Odin to punish Ingeri by providing her with exactly what she asked for.

Why then is a film so grim, so cold, so difficult and challenging also feel strangely hopeful? Odin has won and Töre has turned his back on Christian faith to embrace cold, merciless, pagan violence. But as Töre pleads for forgiveness a spring bursts forth from below the point where Karin’s head lay. Suddenly, water pours out of the ground. Light bathes the clearing from above. Ingeri washes her face and hands, cleaning symbolically the parts of her that made those pagan pleas. Suddenly, from nowhere, the film presents an intense moment of spiritual hope that I found surprisingly moving. Rarely has something so grim, felt so cleansing at its close. Perhaps viewers need the simple, honest refreshing splash of water to help themselves after. That’s what helps makes The Virgin Spring difficult, uncomfortable but essential.