Word: ullmanns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Ullmann plays the selfish and sensual youngest sister and Ingrid Thulin the oldest, who has imprisoned her feelings in walls of ice. Harriet Andersson is the sister who dies of cancer, quite visibly and painfully on the screen. Not only are the interiors of all the rooms red, but whole scenes are periodically suffused in crimson hues. "Don't ask me why it's to be that way, because I can't tell you," Bergman writes in his screenplay. "The bluntest and also most tenable [explanation] is probably that the whole thing is internal, and ever since...
...really a nun called Joan. The time is the Middle Ages. The Saxons, as is their wont, have been sacking the countryside, raping and pillaging and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Under such circumstances, it is hardly safe for a young nun to travel openly. When Joan (Liv Ullmann) must flee her nunnery, loyal Father Adrian (Maximilian Schell) chops her long honey-colored hair into a kind of modified Sassoon, outfits her in a monk's habit and runs with her from the marauding hordes...
...legend could not have been as turgid or as invincibly dull as the film that has been fashioned from it. The film makers, making a wild scramble for contemporary relevance, have chosen to frame the story with a singularly absurd yarn about a schizoid evangelist (also portrayed by Miss Ullmann) who believes she is Pope Joan. "Classic case of withdrawal," mutters Psychiatrist Keir Dullea, peering at her through huge spectacles...
Pope Joan is excellently photo graphed by Billy Williams (Women in Love, Sunday Bloody Sunday) and contains a valiant English-speaking debut by Miss Ullmann, who in the films of Ingmar Bergman has established herself as an actress who must be called great. It is a reputation that may not survive many more movies like this...