Bergman 1: Crisis (1946)

So as a 40th birthday present to myself, I treated myself to the rather spectacular Criterion Collection Ingmar Bergman box set that came out a couple of years ago, which arrived today. I've decided to go through the whole thing initially in chronological order, rather than the "film festival" sequence that the set is organised according to (as interesting as that looks). I shall endeavour to write at least something here about every film, so if Bergman isn't your thing, look away for a couple of months at least.

The other thing that happened today is that Nicholas Parsons died, at the rather splendid age of 96. It's curious (though understandable) how much when people die affects our sense of their period in history. Bergman seems to come from an era before Parsons, and yet the one was born only five years before the other. It's rather pleasingly dislocating to imagine that in a parallel universe Bergman could still have been working until very recently. Apparently Parsons made his stage debut in 1945 at the Aldwych Theatre in something called The Hasty Heart. Just a year later, Bergman's directorial debut, Crisis, was released. Bergman wrote the screenplay, adapting a Danish play by Leck Fischer. The Hasty Heart could even - just about - have worked as a title for the film (the play on which it was based was originally called The Maternal Heart). Crisis is something of an exploration of what it means to love either selfishly or selflessly. The film is a melodrama with plenty of comedy early on that beomes increasingly noirish towards the end, although it doesn't end where a noir would end. (Nor, indeed, would American studios at the time have been able to be anything like so explicit about the entanglements of sex and death that form the film's climax.) The plot centres around a young woman who has been brought up by a foster mother, only for her birth mother suddenly to reappear in her life. Rather refreshingly, the revelation is not, for the character, that her mother is not her mother but rather, for the audience, that she is already perfectly well aware of this.

The film both exploits its origins (a voiceover at the beginning refers to raising the curtain on our play, at which point a character lifts a window blind), and skillfully transforms its material into a convincing film (partly through judicious adaptation, partly though very fluid camerawork and editing - the film looks very good indeed, and at times quite splendid). The story is certainly no masterpiece (in Images Bergman calls it "grandiose drivel"), but it's got plenty going on, and all the characters have an average of at least two dimensions, which is a lot more than one can say for many films, let alone first films. The ending of the original play, one suspects, delivered an anodyne message about returning to what one knows and to those who love you most; while the film doesn't entirely escape this, it also manages to wrinkle things enough that we might also leave with the sense that we shouldn't trust small-town life to be quite what it appears. (This is surely the import of the two supposedly identical middle-distance views of the town that bookend the film.) The most apparently conventional people might have gone through things we would never have dreamed of.

The performances are consistently fine, and seem already to exhibit Bergman's feeling for a level of expressive nuance that's unafraid to push the intensity when required. Dagny Lind as Ingeborg, the stepmother, I found particularly fine in many scenes. The film is perhaps most literally about the daughter Nelly's crisis (Inga Landgré [later Block's wife Karin in The Seventh Seal], in another often strong performance), but it is also, and maybe more profoundly, about Ingeborg's crisis. Although there is perhaps more that separates than unites them, it can't but be interesting to see Bergman at the start of his career exploring an intense relationship between two women, 14 years before that between Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in Persona.