Bergman 14: Brink of Life (1958)

A slight chronological cheat here, since Wild Strawberries (1957) should have been next, but I taught the film to some students only a month or so ago - I did show it to them from the Criterion Blu-ray! - so I felt like watching a film I hadn't seen before. (Suffice it to say I think Wild Strawberries is a stone-cold masterpiece.) After the extraordinary feat of making The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries in the same year, it is no surprise that Bergman turned next to something simple and elegant. Recalling in a way the structure of Waiting Women - three women have parallel experiences - everything here is kept as clean and simple as possible; no flashbacks, no dreams. (The film is one of two Bergman films scripted by Ulla Issakson, the other being The Virgin Spring.) The film looks wonderful - perhaps an argument that Bergman's influence on the visual style far exceeded that of his cinematographers, since if you told me this was shot by Sven Nykvist or Gunnar Fischer I think I would have believed you; in fact it was Max Willén, in the only film he shot for Bergman. (In Images the director calls him "an adequate crftsman without any sensibility or joy".) Though delicately handled, the content of the film doesn't really transcend a kind of kitchen-sink melodrama, but the performances are wonderful. Erland Josephson, in his first significant role for Bergman, manages both to convey a rather cowardly and conventional man, and to show us that this is how his wife sees him rather than who he necessarily is. Bibi Andersson does the job well, though one feels Harriet Andersson would have done more with it (or perhaps Robin Wood's antipathy is rubbing off on me); Ingrid Thulin is very strong; but Eva Dahlbeck is absolutely magnificent. To give details would probably involve spoilers, but she is compelling throughout without giving any sense of an actress trying to be compelling, in a role very different from her previous parts in Bergman films. But she doesn't get a big finish - at the end she slips out of the film in a way that feels tactfully delicate and quietly desolating.