Dreams

Fashion studio replaces circus tent, thus a gender-swapped Sawdust and Tinsel. Photo shoot at a Stockholm agency, mounting tension for the nervous owner (Eva Dahlbeck) and a solid visual-aural opportunity for Ingmar Bergman. (Mirrors and ticking clocks, powdered scrims and the amplified tapping of a client's fat fingers comprise the suffocation.) Trip to Gothenburg, another crack-up aboard the train, dripping and shaken after a quasi-suicidal silent scream. "It would be madness" to seek out a married former flame (Ulf Palme), yet there she is, hiding in the bushes outside his house and scrambling to arrange a rendezvous. At the same time, her model (Harriet Andersson) enjoys the attention of the consul (Gunnar Björnstrand). Up and down the roller-coaster, round and round the carousel, through the skeletons at the haunted house—exhilaration and panic with the "infantile" kitty and the dapper old goat, then chocolate and champagne at his mansion before the dream dissipates. "How did it go? Fresh ideas and great pictures?" Stability and enchantment as two halves of a spontaneous urge, the parallels of weariness and ebullience at the end of the day. Bergman has a splendid way with these contrasting tales, layering the many shades of nervousness and desire and bitterness and hope that go into the meeting of estranged lovers in a hotel room or the playtime of flirtatious strangers on a bear rug. (As the wife hardened beyond jealousy and the daughter "with the head of a wolf," Inga Landgré and Kerstin Hedeby might be one and the same.) Cukor's A Life of Her Own, definitely, Funny Face and Gigi foreglimpsed here and there. "Will you regret this afternoon?" "I'll both regret and cherish it." Back at the studio, the camera dollies through cigarette smoke for a close-up of the heroine's mask of vacant imperiousness. With Sven Lindberg, Benkt-Åke Benktsson, and Axel Düberg. In black and white.