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"Let the play begin." Ingmar Bergman's first feature, with evidence of close study of Ford and Stahl plus incidental points of contact with It's a Wonderful Life. The small-town music teacher (Dagny Lind) muddles along at work ("Be glad that Beethoven is deaf," she sighs at an inept pupil) but cherishes her teenage foster daughter (Inga Landgré). The girl's birth mother (Marianne Löfgren) is a Stockholm beautician who drops by to whisk her away, in tow is the part-time actor and full-time sharpie (Stig Olin). The village lights up for the annual ball but it's really a sedate affair, waltzes only because that's all the mayor can dance—the introductory high-angled view (with diagonal streamers for a geometrically staid composition) later gives way to quick cutting once the youngsters sneak off for a bit of boogie-woogie. "Feminine beauty makes me sad," the gigolo is full of such lines, the heroine is fascinated by his morbid fancifulness until tragedy strikes. The neophyte director retains plenty of theatrical tactics (a couple isolated with looming shadows, curtains pulled to reveal a figure in the frame), but he's also excited by steam filling the screen and rippling reflections in the gloom, and above all the camera's prying proximity as a desperate character contemplates her image before a mirror. The seduction in the empty salon is staged amid severed mannequin heads and scored to laughter from the playhouse next door, torment in the train resurfaces in Thirst, Dreams, The Silence. The happy ending cannot dispel the would-be thespian's anguished words, "one day I'll leave the puppet theater and enter the darkness." With Allan Bohlin, Ernst Eklund, Signe Wirff, and Anna-Lisa Baude. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |