I didn’t know what to watch last night after Donna turned in, but I knew I needed something for my soul. My random pick was Ingmar Bergman’s THE PASSION OF ANNA, which I last saw so long ago that it made little impact and slid out of memory. Watching it this time, it felt almost tailor-made for me. It’s a film about mid-life isolation, in the wake of relationships to which we’ve given our all - and in the background, a harrowing horror film unfolds, about a marauder on a small island community who is going around killing his neighbors’ animals. (Expect some distress from this angle.) The island’s few residents are consequently turning suspicious of one another. One innocent man ends up paying the price, ramping up the horror. In the midst of this, a lonely man (Max von Sydow) meets his neighbors and befriends them. The film is supposedly about his relationship with the troubled Anna (Liv Ullmann), who lost her first husband in a traumatizing car wreck, but first comes his affair with her married but lonely sister-in-law (Bibi Andersson). Her cold husband (Erland Josephson) is a self-absorbed photographer and architect, all of whose scenes Bergman films with a bizarre, Fellini-like flair; they are literally like seeing flamboyant Italian footage dropped into a more stoic Swedish film. We see the Sydow/Andersson affair commence in great detail, and it seems the more promising relationship, but Bergman withholds everything of how the more fractious relationship with Anna began. She is a far more intense, troubled, and volatile woman and perhaps Bergman didn’t know how it began, only that it had to. When we rejoin the story some months into their cohabitation, they are already comfortable with one another - and also believably uncomfortable. We see them play chess and later, when we see them breakfasting together at a small table, they eat together as though getting through breakfast itself was a series of tense chess maneuvers. We also see them watching the world fall apart while watching television at night. (Ullmann has a moment in this film when she is utterly terrifying.) In a very odd touch, the panic-driven story is punctuated with brief interviews with the four principal actors, talking about how they see their characters - these really offer nothing except a margin of suspicion toward the whole venture, as they feel pretentious at best and prefabricated at worst. I think we are meant to feel some hostility toward them, as this is basically a film about being navigating a path through a forest of human distrust after having let your guard down once too often. On the Criterion Channel.
(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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