Word: sydow
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...best film in a long time poses some weighty questions and has the sense to treat them violently in stark and terrifying images reminiscent of Hitchcock (Bergman's favorite director). If you are interested in current discussions of artistic impotence, the dementia of Bergman's protagonist (Max von Sydow) becomes the film's focal point. I found myself more involved by his wife (Liv Ullman) who, in loving him, tries to share his madness but cannot ultimately follow...
...year is 1971, and the scene is Bergman's favorite symbol: an island off the coast. There, a violinist named Jan Rosenberg (Max von Sydow) and his wife Eva (Liv Ullman) cower in their farmhouse, waiting out a civil war that rages on the mainland. It is a truism that in many childless marriages one of the couple assumes the role of the baby. In the Rosenbergs' case, it is Jan, cosseted and petted by Eva during his incessant tantrums and irrational fears. Infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering, afflicted with a bad heart and a sick psyche, Jan lives...
...legitimate to speak of Bergman's players merely as actors. People like Von Sydow and Björnstrand have been with him for over a decade. What the Moscow Art Theater was to Stanislavsky, these performers are to Bergman-ensemble members who function like fingers on a hand. Liv Ullman, newest member of the troupe, is, astonishingly, the best, portraying a whole range of feminine response, from molten eroticism to glacial hate. At the end of his life, Freud wrote: "The great question, which I have not been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into...
Silly Woman. He is not alone. "She's one of the most talented actresses around," says Björnstrand. "A little like Ingmar-full of health, vitality, humor." To Von Sydow, Ullman has "a rare ability to express emotions in front of a camera in a very pure way, very directly. It is something I have rarely seen." To the National Society of Film Critics in the U.S., she was a brilliant actress in the year's best film, Persona; to international audiences, she is the latest Scandinavian beauty who-like Garbo or Ingrid Bergman or Ingrid Thulin...
Even from outside, you can enjoy his characters; deify gaunt Max von Sydow, maintain a healthy lust for Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Anderson, and full-lipped Liv Ullman; be terrified by Hour of the Wolf and Persona, stilled by The Silence, and dragged naked through the fourteenth century in The Seventh Seal. But the distance remains -- the first six rows at the Brattle become an impassable Nordic wasteland. As Stanley Kauffmann said of The Silence, "The film is Bergman musing, and we have intruded...