August Sonata

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: THE BEST INTENTIONS

DIRECTOR: BILLE AUGUST

WRITER: INGMAR BERGMAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Bergman's back and Bille's got him, for a handsome soap opera with a radiant star performance.

Ingmar Bergman used to say, "I make each film as if it were my last." The ( astringent passion he poured into his metaphysical melodramas -- The Seventh Seal, Persona, Autumn Sonata and many others -- testifies to that truth. So no one thought Bergman was kidding when in 1983 he declared that After the Rehearsal would be his last film. He was 65, a good age for a parson or a burgher to retire, and he had always been a most reliably productive artist: in the winter doing his job directing plays at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater, in the summer making films as a kind of holiday in hell. Eight years ago, that routine ended. There was more (luminous) theater work but no Bergman movie.

The Best Intentions -- written by Bergman but directed by Bille August, the Dane who made Pelle the Conqueror -- proves you can't keep a solemn Swede down. It recounts the first married years of Bergman's parents, whose later lives he dramatized in his family-album movie, Fanny and Alexander. In retrospect we can see that Bergman was unlikely to retire to some Fort Lauderdale of the soul; familiar demons would fill his afternoon naps with nightmares. And with the unfinished business of putting his parents on paper. Somebody else would put them on film.

The result is a decorous, resonant three-hour memory film, distilled from a six-hour TV mini-series. Henrik Bergman (Samuel Froler) is a theology student who, it is said, "needs someone to love, so he won't hate himself so much." Anna (Pernilla Ostergren) is a bourgeois princess who finds flint beneath her gentility as she learns to love -- and forces herself to stay with -- this difficult man as he establishes his ministry in a small town. She must find comfort in moments of domestic grace: a chat with her loving father (Max von Sydow), a caress of her pregnant belly by Henrik, who understands that, inside her, there is magic greater than his misery.

At times, when Henrik's dour spirit takes control of the narrative, Intentions threatens to become a mope opera. The film also lacks the intensity that the Swedish master lent his own projects; this is Bergman without Bergman. But it is also Bergman plus August. Like Fanny and Alexander, this film is both worshipful and critical of its heroes. Like Pelle, it sprawls on a canvas of long-ago wealth and want, love and anxiety.

"Films begin with the human face," Bergman said, and he filled his screen with the faces of many great actresses, from Bibi and Harriet Andersson to Liv Ullmann and Lena Olin. Even after retiring as a film director, Bergman was still an ace casting director. This time he insisted that Ostergren, who played the maid in Fanny and Alexander, be cast as Anna. It is the film's great coup. She is not exactly beautiful, but her conviction and radiance carry the story's emotional burden: that such a woman could love such a man. The strength of her love is an almost mystical mystery that Bergman dare not explain, or even understand, but is pleased to present.

August must be doubly pleased that he acceded to Bergman's request. In May the director was onstage at the Cannes Film Festival to receive the top prize for Intentions. Standing next to him was the festival's Best Actress: his bride Pernilla Ostergren August.