Word: bibi
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...Enquist's version the mistress be comes a beer-swigging lesbian, Marie Caroline David (Eileen Atkins), and the wife, Siri von Essen-Strindberg (Bibi Andersson), proclaims her love for her to Strindberg's horror, anger, jealousy and despair. The lines, mean and many, are sulfurous fumes straight from the marriage pit. In much of Enquist's play, Strindberg spews vitriolic putdowns at both women. These speeches are used to indicate the large feminine component in Strindberg's nature of which he was fully aware and which he wished to exorcise through a bludgeoning masculinity...
There is no insecurity in Max von Sydow. He gives a towering performance. In intensity, innate authority and mordant humor, this is acting in the thermodynamic range. Bibi Andersson is pallid by comparison, a picture-postcard beauty who recites her lines without the intent to lacerate-rather strange considering her snake-fanged delivery as a wife in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Eileen Atkins is in Von Sydow's league. She encases herself in a palpable shield of silence and then hurls her lines like javelins dead on the mark...
...mental hospital in which Debby learns to deal with her schizophrenia is more believable. Like Green, Page manages to balance the harsh methods used to control the inmates--a sadistic orderly, and prolonged wrapping in cold sheets to quiet hysteria--with the compassion shown by Debby's psychiatrist (Bibi Andersson) and the kindness shown by nurses and Debby's intimate friends. Yet this rather sympathetic portrayal could lead one to think that the insane are cured by kind words and firm control. Once again, Page's superficial treatment destroys the story: Debby's psychoanalysis seems suspiciously easy as the psychiatrist...
Part of the reason is a studied even-handedness that smacks more of documentary than drama. Deborah (Kathleen Quinlan) is blessed with an extraordinarily sympathetic and skillful psychiatrist, Dr. Fried (Bibi Andersson), but the other psychiatrists are portrayed as stodgy and rigid. Most of the patients in the disturbed ward are worse off than Deborah (Sylvia Sidney, Signe Hasso and Susan Tyrrell, among others, have a high old time playing them), but one-who befriends Deborah-is better. One of the male nurses is brutal, but another is kind...
Quinlan, 22, mirrors Deborah's inner turmoil in a strong and sensitive performance. The splendid Bibi Andersson does as much as possible with the passive role of Dr. Fried, but the film makers' conception of the role is a letdown. There are some absorbing early glimpses of Dr. Fried's sessions with Deborah, but one suspects that several later scenes were cut, as if the film decided to shy away from the struggle of minds. We see Deborah's emotional breakthrough, but the question of precisely how Dr. Fried helped bring it about is fudged...