Derek Malcolm recommends: Ingmar Bergman - Dangerous Liaisons

Barbican Cinema will screen two masterpieces by Ingmar Bergman, Persona and Cries and Whispers
15 November 2013

It used to be said that the easiest way to empty commercial cinemas was to put on a film by either Jean-Luc Godard or Ingmar Bergman. Yet to see one of the best films from either great film-maker can be an unforgettable experience.

It is to be hoped that programmers at the Barbican cinemas don’t regret their short Bergman season, put on to complement the Barbican Theatre’s fine stage production of the master’s lacerating Scenes from a Marriage (running until Sunday).

The season is designed to provide further evidence that, on the whole, women interested Bergman more than men. And he certainly cast some extraordinary actresses. Bibi and Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin, whose work is seen in the season, are a matchless quartet.

On Sunday, the choice is Persona, one of the most complicated and radical films even Bergman ever made. It has Liv Ullmann as an actress who has mysteriously stopped speaking in the middle of a performance of Electra and goes for treatment from a specialist nurse (Bibi Andersson).

Gradually, however, the actress proves the stronger of the two women and their two personalities seem to merge. Bergman said that, once he had got rid of his residual belief in God, he could get on with searching for the truth about people.

Persona is an utterly coruscating experiment, way before its time, and a curiously erotic one too. He didn’t have to engineer sweaty bed scenes to show the complications of sex.

Later, there’s another masterpiece in Cries and Whispers, Bergman’s version of Three Sisters. The three come together to look after the eldest (Harriet Andersson) who is apparently dying but proceed to do almost everything but murder each other.

Too depressing? Well, I can understand that some might avoid either film. But the acting is so subtle, the film-making so sure (Sven Nykvist shot both films brilliantly) that Bergman’s essential pessimism about human nature, and possibly his own, seems to have much more than a shaft of truth within it.

Incidentally, Liv Ullmann once told me that it was not true that everyone was miserable and nervous on Bergman’s sets. There was a lot of laughter too. Apparently he smiled a lot, especially at his women actors. After all, he married one of them.

Ingmar Bergman: Dangerous Liaisons is at the Barbican Cinema (020 7638 8891, barbican.org.uk) until Nov 24. barbican.org.uk

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