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Saturday, March 17, 2018

The beauty and despair of Bergman's darkest film, The Passion of Anna

Nobody goes to an Ingmar Bergman movie (pace Smiles of a Summer Night) to be cheered up, but perhaps The Passion of Anna (1969) is the darkest of all his movies, and this darkness of mood and vision is made all the more weird and striking by the look of the film, one of the first (maybe the first) Bergman film shot (by Sven Nykrist) in color. The look of the film is beautiful throughout, lonely but striking winter exteriors on a Baltic island, interiors with warm lamplight and muted sunlight through shades, incredible close-ups with beautiful half-light on the attractive lead actors (most notably one sequence on Liv Ullman in which the only light seems to come from her blue eyes). But the story Bergman tells in yet another chamber drama - only 4 main characters, and one secondary character - is of a world in which everyone is debased, full of shame, struggling against pent-up violent urges that occasionally explode with ruinous results. Bergman has often been criticized, rightly in my view, for his misogyny - in so many films his female leads are mentally unstable, clingy and dependent, out of touch w/ reality, unfaithful, threatening - but in this film he goes one better, now his a misanthrope altogether. The lead, Max von Sydow (Andreas) among other things drinks to excess and then brutally slaps around his partner, Ullman (the eponymous Anna). One of the mysteries of the film - never quite resolved in fact - is that someone on the small island kills and brutalizes animals. One of the misfits on the island gets blamed, and beaten, for this, leading to his suicide. Perhaps he was guilty; or perhaps it was Andreas's only friend, an architect who keeps a weird collection of news clippings and other documents are crimes and social aberrations. Who knows? (Perhaps a second viewing would clear some of the mysteries, though I doubt it.) The point is that everyone on the island is duplicitous, guilty, escaping from something, abusive, and dangerous. There appears to be no way out and no possible resolution (the island setting adds to this feeling of isolation); this is a film - great at times despite its harrowing, dark vision - from an auteur whose mind, at that point in this life, was at a point of despair.

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