Word: bergmans
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They got Albert Finney to play Hercule Poirot. They also got, in alphabetical order as protocol dictates, Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Richard Widmark and Michael York, all as murder suspects. And still they got nothing...
...like the swinger, they believe in the changes they see and feel, however facile and temporary they may be. For the first time in years, Bergman is dealing with the specifics of modern society. When love breaks down the modern institutions are the primary cause; the incorporeal concerns Bergman can usually convey are absent. So this film brings forward no sense of awe. The spiritual sense is cut out from underneath--what's left are the rocky, excessive emotions bred by the petty, inchoate sexual relations of a sexually and politically unequal society. Bergman has never isolated these passions before...
...stage directions, but except when Johan first leaves Marianne the passions are too strong for what's happening. The screenplay seems just good enough to make small, slippery claims on the audience's emotion; of course, it does much more. Partly, this happens because of the unusual rapport between Bergman and his actors, particularly Liv Ullman. It seems as if her emotions would be moving even if grounded in nothing at all. Sven Nykvist's photography, that normally adds so much to the metaphysical quality of Bergman's moods, is simplified in this film for the small TV screen...
...another factor is the open-endedness caused by cutting the movie from 300 minutes of Swedish TV to three hours for U.S. theaters. Bergman made all the cuts himself, dropping most of the minor characters--even the pair's children--and cutting references to them in other places. The film, as cut, is all of one piece, but it leaves out so much that it isn't the same work. It seems, from the published screenplay, that the film he released is like a violent sketch for a larger, more detailed painting that would lose sensation because it covered...
ENDING OUR MARRIAGES makes us reborn, Bergman seems to say, and he may be edging near the truth. The marriage he shows came from a social base where everything worked against it, and the new lives of the reawakened partners seem no more fulfilling. But if Marianne and Johan have even a slightly better idea of what went wrong, they may pass on that little bit of wisdom--speeding the apocalyptic day when love won't conquer anyone but will make peace with all, in an age of sense and reason and sexual equality. But it's not even clear...