Bergman 11: Dreams (1955)

Also known as Journey into Autumn, though the Swedish title - Kvinnodröm - actually means "Women's Dreams". The narrative is built out of very familiar melodramatic materials. It tells the story of two women (a middle aged fashion photographer called Susanne - Eva Dahlbeck - and one of her young models, Doris - Harriet Andersson) and what happens to them on a trip to Gothenburg. Doris is plied with luxuries by a much older man - Gunnar Björnstrand; initially wary, she indulges him, only for it to emerge that his wife has been in an asylum for decades and Doris reminds him of her. Björnstrand's daughter unjustly (perhaps?) accuses Doris of being his whore, and yet as she leaves she leaves behind everything he bought for her. Susanne is attempting to rekindle her affair with a married man, only for the man's wife to tell her what she already knew - that it has no future. The parallels between the two strands are handled lightly for the most part, inviting us to consider whether the younger or the older woman is the more mature, until they are underlined by the presence of two climactic scenes in which women confront one another with a subdued and desolate man in the background. Certainly there are elements of the sexual politics that draw the attention of the contemporary viewer, but the film's interest is genuinely in the womens' experience - it is by no means a male exculpation carried out vicariously by means of fictional women. Some critics, I think, feel that the film doesn't transcend its material, but this seems to me one of its strengths - it doesn't ironize nor indulge it, but fully inhabits it, assisted greatly by the strength of the performances. (In addition, Susanne - at least - becomes fully aware that she is living a cliché. It is this that makes her, ultimately, the more mature woman, and yet the irony is that she can only come to this realisation by seeing her wishful thinking through to its end; in the heat of the moment Doris is the one able to act with greater strength and nobility.) And the film is also visually and sonically very strong indeed, with Hilding Bladh (of Sawdust and Tinsel) returning as cinemtographer and doing a magnificent job. The film highlights a number of dialogue-free sequences in which sound and image delineate character and situation in a clear, stylised, and yet entirely economical and integrated fashion. The film is an elegant exploration of externality and internality, or perhaps externality as internality. In this it reminds me of the fact that the science-fiction novelist M. John Harrison has said that he is most proud of his novel about rock climbing, Climbers (1989), because it is the novel of his that is most completely about fantasy, while being completely devoid of the fantastic. Similarly, Dreams is wholly concerned with the dreams by means of which we live our lives, and yet there isn't a dream sequence or even a flashback to be found.