Word: bergmans
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...Ingmar Bergman has been listening to, and making, these confessions for half a century--in films, such as The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly and Persona, that define the age of anxiety. And though Bergman retired from film directing in 1983, he has continued to write for the screen, wrestling with his Lutheran God, facing up to his household demons, making them the stuff of astringent artistry...
...version of the sacrament of penance) is the last of a trilogy of films about his parents. All three--the others are the 1982 Fanny and Alexander and the 1992 Best Intentions--were made as Swedish TV serials, then condensed for theatrical release. This film, directed by Bergman's lustrous actress Liv Ullmann, is the finest of the three. It distills four lives into a series of chats, revelatory confessions, between a woman and the men in her life...
...people talking--drama and life in its essence. The camera, manned by Bergman's master cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, holds on the actors' faces as they pour or spit out their lines. The film could lie there, inert and artless as an episode of an afternoon soap opera. It doesn't; it brings old rancors and flames alive. These troubled folks might be your parents...
...Bergman is back in the haunted house he built for himself. He sets his favorite obsessions--God and sex--at war in all these desperate creatures. The men try balancing their clerical duties with their clumsy passions. Henrik's first reaction on hearing of Anna's infidelity is to console her, as a minister would a sinner; Tomas kneels before Anna as a communicant receiving the Eucharist, or a child before its mother. Love is a sacrament of which neither man is worthy. Henrik and Tomas are really complementary halves of one weak man: the Bergman man. Henrik tastes...
Based on the Ingmar Bergman comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night, A Little Night Music leaves the audience perplexed. The young, the fools and the old all manage to pair up (more or less) successfully before the curtain falls, but one can hardly leave Gfaller's production with the feeling of having seen a romantic comedy. The resolution comes unexpectedly, and most of the characters remain wistful even in the arms of their lovers. This drama remains under the spell of Leonora's cynicism and the chorus's surrealism, just as the characters remain in the perpetual twilight...