Ingmar Bergman

Intermezzo: Now About These Women

180 Intermezzo Now About These Women Each Bergman film since Prison has its own defined individual character, but in obvious ways Now About These Women is unusually isolated from all the rest. It remains—until A Passion is released—Bergman’s only film in color, and it uses color to accentuate the deliberately artificial and stylized prettiness of the decor. Bergman used color, in fact, once before, for some preliminary work on Through a Glass Darkly, and is reported to have scrapped the result and started again because it looked “too pretty”; that he felt color appropriate to Now About These Women tells us something of its character and of Bergman’s attitude toward making it. It is easy to understand that after the sustained intensity of the Trilogy, Bergman felt a desire to make something emotionally (though not formally) relaxed, which would give him a respite from his probing of the deepest levels of emotional experience. To call The Silence a work of extraordinary courage is not to use empty phrases: the creation of such a film involves exposure to emotional experiences most of us would shrink from and the risk of jeopardizing one’s personal stability. Intermezzo 181 But it was impossible for Bergman, from the position he had reached, to recapture the spontaneity and warmth of that earlier relaxation, A Lesson in Love, that followed Sawdust and Tinsel. Now About These Women strikes one as above all calculated and deliberate. No one I have met finds it very funny, and I don’t think (pace Ian Cameron, in his interesting analysis of the film in Movie)12 that it is defensible on the grounds that it isn’t meant to be. When Bergman made A Lesson in Love he was—in however relaxed a way—wholly engaged; when he made Now About These Women he couldn’t afford to be, couldn’t afford to allow the deeper levels of himself to be stirred, or there could have been no comedy, not even an unfunny one. Hence the sense of thinness and brittleness that one gets from the film. One admires Bergman for turning at such a time to the traditional set pieces of slapstick comedy—attempts to balance a huge marble bust, a tea-and-cream-cake retaliation scene, an impromptu and unintended firework display (Jacques Tati’s Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot) [Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)] is one of his favorite films), a sequence with the protagonist in “drag”—and bringing them off in a curious sort of way. For if they aren’t very funny, they are never boring, and no sequence is bungled. The laughter evoked by Buster Keaton, by Laurel and Hardy, and for many by Tati is intimately bound up with the warm flow of sympathy they release in the spectator; the slapstick of Bergman’s film is necessarily cut off from any such flow so that one admires its aplomb but keeps a straight face. The film, besides its function as interlude between the emotional rigors of The Silence and Persona, is part retrospect, part testament, and part neither. It collects together a number of actresses associated with Bergman’s previous work, notably Eva 182 robin wood Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, and Bibi Andersson, who play, one might say, “themselves”: that is, they recapitulate their familiar personae from earlier Bergmans. Especially in the case of the two Anderssons, the performances are simplified and exaggerated to an extent amounting to parody, which befits the artificiality of the whole film. It is tempting, therefore, to see it as a film about Bergman and his actresses: each of master cellist Felix’s women satisfies a different aspect of his personality, therefore by extension each reflects the aspect she satisfies and can be taken as expressing it. This idea relates interestingly to the way in which Bergman’s own development has consistently been reflected in his choice of actresses; it is sufficiently suggested in the film to mislead the critic who naturally likes to make everything tie up neatly. For it cannot, in fact, be pressed very far. The significance of the Eva Dahlbeck character, Felix’s wife and protectress of his artistic integrity, goes rather beyond what one sees as Miss Dahlbeck’s role in Bergman’s development , and several of the women have no clear counterparts in his work. More...