Disappointing Bergman

Disappointing Bergman Itis impossible to be quite fair enough to Ingmar Bergman. He has done too well. Too much is demanded. In a career of more than 25 years, he has made half a dozen films that must be considered great. His anguish after God, his personal pain and his peerless intellect have yielded such classics as The Naked Night (1953), The Seventh Seal (1956) and Wild Strawberries (1958). Of his more recent films, Persona is one of the most complex personal works in all of the cinema, and Shame and The Passion of Anna should be counted among his finest work. Every time Bergman makes a new film--and he makes one each year--enormous expectations are aroused.

The Touch is Bergman's first film in English. It is certainly not among his better ones. An intimate psychological drama about a love affair and an ensuing domestic crisis, The Touch is reminiscent of those sober and slightly dreary "women's dramas" that Bergman made back in the mid-'5'0s, films like A Lesson in Love or Brink of Life. The plot is narrowly, intensely focused on a housewife named Karin (Bibi Andersson), who is approaching middle age and who, after 15 years of marriage, yields to her first extramarital affair. Hers is a loving, even a model marriage, which her affair inevitably endangers. And her choice-of a lover implies strong tendencies toward an almost suicidal self-contempt.

David Kovac (Elliott Gould) is an American archaeologist born in Germany and educated in Israel, who has learned a good deal about the past and almost nothing of his own psyche. He is alternately childish and brutal, contemptuous and suffocatingly possessive. He tells Karin shortly after their first meeting that he is in love with her. She is frightened but flattered. She visits him at his apartment, but that afternoon he is impotent. Later he has her for the first time by abusing and almost raping her.

Bergman continually emphasizes the changes in Karin and David through the developing parallels between them. She first meets him in a hospital, moments after the death of her mother; some time afterward the lovers spend an afternoon looking through a family photo album, and Kovac speaks rather too fondly of his own dead mother. Karin responds equally to the tenderness and humiliation he lavishes on her.

Paralysis. One day Kovac brings Karin to his excavation to show off his prize, a centuries-old madonna, which is being consumed from within by mysterious insects that had lain dormant for 500 years and revived only when the figure was brought up from underground. It is an obvious and not especially felicitous metaphor for Karin herself. When the lovers finally part and Karin desperately pursues David to London, she meets his sister, a cripple suffering from an unnamed muscular paralysis, which she claims to share with her brother. Karin reacts to this as if it were a kind of sign (as indeed it is), and returns to Sweden to have her baby. She is not sure whether the father is David or her own husband. Nor is she sure that it matters.

The Touch is a remote and rather unsympathetic film that suffers from some language problems. One reason that Bergman is a great film maker is that he is an exceptional writer, but the dialogue here is ponderous, stagy and stiff. Bergman may be fluent in English, but he does not seem entirely comfortable with it. Under his direction Gould does well enough physically, most especially in the scenes where he is playing close to crazy. But his line readings often ring hollow. Bibi Andersson has a showcase part and makes the most of it in a rich and thoroughly memorable performance. Max von Sydow lends strength and great depth to the role of the cuckolded husband, giving the film its only portion of real warmth.

The first minutes of The Touch, an aching evocation of personal loss when Karin discovers her dead mother, show Bergman at his finest. It is a sequence that sets a level of quality that the rest of the film fails to match. When a film of Bergman's does not measure up to the exacting standards he has set for himself, the disappointment may be slightly disproportionate. It is not any the less acute.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.