Take One (Oct 1976)

SS Oo -. —_—_ OOreeereeescoOsS<SWO"vO0O0O0—WSO0S0S0S0S0.00 ess o£0s—aae, the dramatic progression aren’t randomly or carelessly chosen. With the fragmentation and galloping continuity, there is no confusion: all questions are eventually answered. (| was reminded of the purposeful jump cuts in early Godard; surprisingly, there was great lucidity there too.) Impact is felt, secondly, because of the active participation required of the viewer to fill in the spaces. How uncommon for a motion picture audience to share in the creative pleasure! | wouldn't want ail my movie fare to be like Souvenirs d’en France — but as alternative cinema, it’s really thrilling. | can almost, but not quite, state I’ve never seen anything like it — after all, the film works of Duras, Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, even Sontag are forebears; but often these creations have been cold-blooded intellectual exercises (L’Immortelle, Duet for Cannibals) or predictable rehashes of Pirandello (Trans-Europ Express) or pretentious slather (Muriel). None seemed in its natural milieu as a film. Till now, the nouveau roman has travelled Strictly literary terrains, never cinematic ones. With Souvenirs d’en France, all that may change. It is the first unqualified masterpiece to emerge from its origins. a Oeuvre again Diane Jacobs reviews Face to Face Directed by Ingmar Bergman The trouble with being an auteur is that, by definition, one repeats oneself; and the greater the oeuvre, the greater the risk. There is quite a nice sequence in Hitchcock’s Family Plot, for instance, which palls beside the sublimity of Vertigo. Face to Face opens with credits superimposed over an undulating sea (presumably symbolizing the subconscious), and, indeed, it is less a compendium of Bergman's obsessions than a washed-out revision of his finer works. It is a convincing film, so far as acting and atmosphere are concerned, but it lacks conviction. The story of a _ well-adjusted professional woman’s breakdown and _ attempted suicide, Face to Face meshes the accessible look of Scenes From a Marriage with the dilemmas of Wild Strawberries. Like Isak of the earlier work, Dr. Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullman) is Diane Jacobs’ book on the new American directors is to be published shortly by London's Tantivy Press. 40 Ingmar Bergman eggs on his players, on the set of Face to Face. oy a doctor (here a psychiatrist) unable to heal herself. On top of a bad conscience, she suffers a long-seething libido. The film opens as Jenny returns to her grandparents’ home to spend the summer months while her husband attends a conference in Chicago and her daughter is at camp. Isolated events lead up to what is presented as ineluctable collapse. Jenny has had influenza and is out of sorts and exhausted. Vacation is impossible until the Fall. A grim-lipped woman cloaked in black, with one gouged eye confronts her at the threshold of her childhood home and later that night in a dream. Reappearing at significant moments throughout the film, this ominous vision represents the darker aspect of her accomodating grandmother — and, perhaps, a premonition of whom she herself is to become. At work, a fellow doctor advises Jenny that a favorite patient is beyond hope; at home, she watches a partially senile grandfather struggle with the _ aftereffects of a stroke. She takes a lover, who bores her, and meets a gynecologist, Tomas Jacobi, at a party but refuses to embark on a sexual relationship. The immediate cause of her breakdown appears to be an attempted rape, in which the violator is unable to penetrate her cramped body. An overwrought Jenny attempts suicide during her grandparents’ absence, is saved by Tomas, and spends the remaining third of the film exploring the seeds of her distress: a loveless marriage, excessive fear of death, unappeasable guilt. Counterpoints to Jenny’s experience are offered in the felicitous marriage of her grandparents and the anxieties of Tomas: divorced and, more recently, embroiled in a homosexual liaison with a young actor. Jenny's husband, who returns briefly when he learns of her hospitalization, is rather like Cecilia's impassive spouse in Brink of Life: proper, reserved, unaffectionate. Jenny’s young daughter also makes a brief appearance, callowly attributing her mother’s suicide to dislike for her child. As in Brink of Life, Bergman makes a point of denigrating the scientific mentality. Both Jenny and Tomas are doctors with little notion of how to deal with their own minds or bodies. At one point Tomas inquires of an hysterical Jenny if he ought to call a doctor. “With all the expertise here already?” she parries. The characters in Face to Face are diaphanous or distorted counterparts to Bergman’s most vital personalities. Like Wild Strawberries’ |sak, Jenny and Tomas are out of touch with their feelings. Tomas is ambivalent sexually, while Jenny alludes to her frigidity and an inability to experience life free of the barriers of inhibition. In place of the vigorous Sara (Bibi Andersson) who serves as foil for lIsak in Wild Strawberries, Face to Face has substituted a buffoon-like elderly woman in love with a man half her age and wealthy enough to keep him and his male lover. Love and death and how they merge, the one compensating for the other, is at the marrow of this, like so many previous Bergman films. One of my favorite Bergman themes is best expressed in his own statement, ‘“‘“Whenever | am in doubt or uncertainty | take refuge in the vision of a simple and pure love.” Such is the love of Marie and Henrik in Summer Interlude, of Stina and her husband in Brink of Life, of Jof and Mia in The Seventh Seal, etc. In Face to Face Bergman attempts to build a similar metaphor through the relationship of Jenny’s grandparents. Unfortunately, the grandparents don’t work. On a plot level alone, the grandfather is a problematic character. One minute he is barely able to move a limb, the next we see him prowling the house in the middle of the night to fix a clock. As for the grandmother, she is too equivocal a personality to serve as beacon to the troubled Jenny. From the start, we are informed that the two women are similar in nature,