Eternal for the Moment

Secrets of Women (Svensk Filmindus-tri; Janus) is Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman's belatedly exported first comedy, filmed in 1952. during a period of relative lightheartedness--Death enters the film momentarily, but he goes away. Four dissatisfied wives, to put the matter redundantly, are having coffee in a summerhouse. While they wait for their husbands to arrive for the weekend, each tells of the moment when she became resigned to the clod she married. In the brilliant, imperfect episodes that follow, Bergman illustrates the Chesterfieldian proposition that he went on to prove later in Smiles of a Summer Night and A Lesson in Love: the position is indeed ridiculous, but the pleasure is anything but momentary if one is making one's mate look foolish.

The first and slightest of the confessions offers a fairly standard cuckold--an anguished antique fancier who, moments after he hears the lewd news, is babbling distractedly of who should get the sideboard. The wife, as generally happens in a Bergman gavotte, frees herself of both lover and husband, but with maternal indulgence accepts the husband again. Aficionados will appreciate a surprising private joke; as the lovers loll in a boathouse, brooding over the sin they are about to commit, an enormous black fish appears in the water below. The adulterers regard it for a moment. Then one of them, mocking psychiatry and symbol-mad film directors, laughs wryly "at Freud's theories," and they get back to their lovemaking.

The second episode is a sober bit of flashbackery--an unmarried girl (Maj-Britt Nilsson) recalls, between labor pains, the lowlife who led her wrong. She remembers brooding in her room, when a note slid in over the sill: Will you open your door a little? She did, a little, and sat on the floor beside it. A glass of wine was pushed through the crack. She accepted it, and soon a small and very silly sculpture appeared in its place. She cradled the carving, and her reticent suitor started a Bergman serenade: "Just now my love is without end; Eternal is my love at this moment . . ."

The best of the confessions involves the superb farceurs of Smiles and Lessons. Gunnar Bjornstrand, tall, reserved, marinated in dignity, is a corporation president, and pillowy, blonde Eva Dahlbeck is his wife. Coming home from a formal-dress party, they get stuck in a self-service elevator. Frantically he stays calm. She laughs. He rages. She twits him about his reserve: is he that way with his mistresses? He blusters, then grows suspicious: has she had lovers? "Of course," she says prettily. The lights go out; she clutches at him; his top hat is mashed. The lights go on; she mocks him; he ogles her decolletage. Next morning the couple awakes on the floor of the elevator to see the servants peering solemnly through the bars. There is a frantic rustle of disarrayed satins; dignity teeters, then drops in the soup. Laughing wildly, the reunited lovers clump up the stairs to bed. They swear eternal constancy, but Bergman has taught his lessons well; for his audiences, the best-learned lesson in love is to smile at promises.

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