Year of Release: 1971
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Elliot Gould, Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow, Sheila Reid
Running Time: 112 minutes
Genre: Drama
Karin Vergerus (Andersson) lives in a small coastal town in Sweden with her surgeon husband Andreas (Sydow) and two children. Karin's pleasant, ordered life is turned upside down when she starts an affair with visiting American archeologist David (Gould).
This marks two first for prolific Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. It was the first film he made for an American studio with an established Hollywood star, and his first film with English dialogue. Bergman's preferred version of the film has Swedish and English dialogue, but the American studio insisted that he prepare a version entirely in English. The films tends to be dismissed and overlooked. Bergman himself regarded it as a "failure". However I found it a powerful and beautiful film. The story is told entirely from Karin's perspective, and there are several mysteries which are never explained. Karin's life with Andreas is solid and nice. Andreas is a nice, steady, polite, gentle, dependable, handsome man, and they live in a. large, airy, bright house with a lot of sunlight and Karin goes through her steady daily routine with mechanical aplomb, in some playful, early scenes we see her go about her day accompanied by bland, repetitive, irritating pop music. David is a glamorous foreigner, promising passion and excitement. He is however volatile, childish, sullen, angry, selfish and sometimes violent. His large apartment is dark and bare, with a constant noise of construction outside the window. Karin is trapped between two worlds, unwilling to commit to either. At one point she mentions fantasising about a world in which she can move seamlessly between her two lives without hurting anyone. Her turning point comes when she is forced to make a decision one way or another. Karin and Andreas seem to believe in keeping up appearances and letting sleeping dogs lie. They are essentially passive. David however believes in living for the moment, and to hell with the consequences. He believes in freedom, however the freedom can be a double edged sword. throughout the film he is renovating. medieval church and excavates a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, which has been immaculately preserved, however when David uncovers it and puts it on display insects that were hibernating within the statue are revived and start eating it from the inside out. Another interesting point with David that is only apparent in the bilingual version of the film is that although he has spent six months a year for two years living in Sweden, he never speaks any Swedish only English, and Karin and Andreas only talk to him in English. It's never discussed whether he knows any Swedish or not. Max von Sydow gives a typically dignified, restrained performance, conveying a lot while showing very little, Elliot Gould is effective as David although he seems a little uncomfortable with his visit to Bergmanland, but the film belongs to Bibi Andersson who is in almost every scene in the film, and she gives a powerful performance. The film, which takes place in bleak autumn and winter, is beautifully shot by regular Bergman Cinematographer Sven Nykvist.
This may not be pone of Bergman's best outings, but it is powerful and deserves to be better known.
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