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The camera lens, naturally, microscope and mirror. Murky undulating waters, silhouetted figures out of a primordial soup, just a refreshing summertime swim in the Baltic island. The young woman fresh out of the asylum (Harriet Andersson) finds herself with heightened senses, "maybe it's the electric shock therapy." Dad (Gunnar Björnstrand) writes to fill the void, he gives out gifts and then excuses himself to howl in anguish. Bro (Lars Passgård) is a gangling would-be playwright, sister's ample femininity "makes me feel like a skinned rabbit." Hubby (Max von Sydow) is a clinical soul, tacitly vexed by her rebuffing. Madness, faith and inspiration, harrowingly blurred over a night and a day. "I can't live in two words. I have to choose." Ingmar Bergman cleans house and starts over, a ruthless development toward bareness, virtually a second first film. The image is stripped, Andersson on her knees with her torment in a room with ripped wallpaper. Papa documents it in a journal and includes it in his latest novel, "an accurate description of her gradual disintegration," cf. Rossellini's La Paura. Bach cellos, sirens and birds in the distance. The disused pavilion accommodates the son's opus, The Artistic Haunting, or The Tomb of Illusions, impotence is the theme, "almost like Shakespeare." The ship at sea is an inescapable confessional, wrecked on the shore it is a cavernous, dripping womb where sister and brother hide and tumble. Amid frauds, pedants and brats, the heroine's divine revelation in the waiting room of the mind. She recounts the arachnid vision and ascends in the helicopter-ambulance, the affirmation of the ending is cold comfort for the hollow bookman: "Poor little Papa, forced to live in reality." Through A Woman Under the Influence it passes, to arrive at Antichrist. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |