Word: bergman
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...week. Back then, in the 1960s, they were called films, they came from Sweden and Italy and France, and they were taken Very Seriously. They bent the old-fashioned narrative line into a double helix, with sneaky dream sequences and complex flashbacks. You'd come out of an Ingmar Bergman film debating which part was fantasy and which reality, and what did it all really mean? Sexually, European dramas were less fettered than the Hollywood stuff; an art-film lover could get both stimulated and aroused. They were wonderful pictures too, some of them. Movies have never been so daring...
...capacious reach, the picture means to embrace three decades of European films. For 2 hours 47 minutes, it dances from the skeptical eroticism of mid-'60s Czech films to the leaden sentimentality of French Director Claude Lelouch. At its best, it recalls the anguished intensity of vintage Bergman. At its worst, with its English-speaking actors sporting Middle European accents, it reminds one of De Duva, a parody of Bergman films in which Death (speaking in Borscht Belt Swedish) gets dumped on by a symbolic dove. Sleek and lubricious, elliptical and dead serious, Lightness dares to be laughed...
...stiff and controlled as Margaret. House wears the self-conscious artiness of its images and characters like a badge, and Mamet's dialogue sounds impossibly stilted. The scenes between Crouse and her patients demonstrate that no one would ever tell this woman anything. Everything is terribly solemn and Bergman-esque...
After four days the drama has begun to take shape, but Bergman is far from satisfied. "We need more emotion. I'm getting full resistance," he complains. In one scene, Emck must scream obscenities at Frank. "Sounds too ladylike," the director mutters; then, to Frank: "Is that how your mother sounded?" "Worse," says Frank. "Do it again," Bergman tells Emck, as the process of art imitating life is guided by the patient's recollection of a moment in a five-year-old's life...
...Bergman must take this raw material, put it into some order and then "frame it to represent the world of the child." The set consists of red tubular scaffolding with connecting platforms. Around this are displayed the emblems of childhood: a red plastic baseball bat, a father's jacket, a mother's frying pan, a sister's dress and, the play's most symbolic prop, the leather strap. For three hours actors and patients work at making a whole out of their disparate scenes. What emerges is a riveting pastiche in which children are beaten by drunken parents, humiliated...