Random Thoughts

Harald & Harald. Ingmar Bergman. 1996. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.

This is a satirical political short (all unusual things for Bergman) about a text produced by the Ministry of Culture in Sweden. It’s funny, but I don’t have the context here, so I’m slightly lost.

Here’s a typical sentence they’re reading and making fun of: “The theatre is characterised by the number of people who are extremely interested being rather small.”

It’s stilted bureaucratese, but, you know…

I got my copy of this from the Bergman bootlegger.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

Private Confessions (Enskilda samtal). Liv Ullmann. 1996. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.

I couldn’t find this film anywhere: Not on Amazon, not Netflix, not nowhere, so I torrented it. And the torrent turned out to be with Spanish dialogue. *sigh*

But then it turns out that some kind person has put the entire thing on Youtube. Thank you.

Pernilla August and Samuel Fröler reprise their roles as Bergman’s parents from The Best Intentions. But confusingly enough, Max von Sydow is back, too, but not in the same role.

It’s directed by Liv Ullmann, and she interprets Bergman’s script much more convincingly than Bille August did in the previous film. And Sven Nykvist is back as the cinematographer, so it’s a jolly old reunion, you have to assume.

This was made as av TV series, too, but I watched the shortened theatrical version. One of these years I should rewatch all the TV versions of everything from Scenes from a Marriage onwards…

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

The Last Gasp (Sista skriket). Ingmar Bergman. 1995. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐★.

The first ten minutes is documentary: Bergman shows us clips from old Swedish films (pre 1920) and tells us a bit about the people that made the films.

And then we get a one act TV play where Bergman imagines a meeting between two of these filmmakers.

It’s basically a monologue, and it’s great. The guy who does the monologue’s fine, but I can’t help imagining Gunnar Björnstrand in the role, perhaps because he seems to be adopting some of his mannerisms in imagining what a 1920 actor/director would behave like.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

The Best Intentions (Den goda viljan). Bille August. 1992. ⭐⭐⭐★★★.

The copy I had of this film didn’t work, so I had to watch it via Amazon Prime, and it turns out to have two levels of subtitling in English: One from the theatrical version (burned into the film) and one for the hard of hearing (which I probably could have switched off before I ripped it from Amazon for watching on Linux). And since it’s Amazon, the latter subtitles grow increasingly out of sync and at the end appear half a minute before the sound.

Oh, well.

Anyway, this is yet another film with a script by Bergman based on his autobiography. (Well, it’s a TV series also released theatrically.) So lots of early-1900s drama. But this isn’t bad; directed by the guy who later did The House of the Spirits and other overblown pan-European melodramas.

It’s fun seeing Max von Sydow again. It’s been, like, several weeks. But everything that’s fun about Bergman has been straightened out and made obvious and overblown; no emotional beat is allowed to proceed without the score telling us how to feel, the children laugh at exactly the right place, the camera moves to the right place for the actors to walk into for maximum melodramatic effect.

This was apparently a major success and won a lot of awards (like the Cannes d’or one). I think it doesn’t get interesting until after the marriage, because the portrait of the priest and his wife (i.e., Bergman’s parents) at work is new and fresh and very sympathetic. And then it goes zzz again.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.