Bergman 21: All These Women (1964)

After the intensities of the trilogy, one can hardly begrudge Bergman something light, and it is splendid to see him explode into colour (the film looks wonderful in the restoration on the Criterion set). And there is a certain simple pleasure in seeing so many familiar Bergman faces in colour. One can also hardly begrudge him being silly - surely the profound filmmaker is not obliged to be consistently profound, even when at their most comic. One of the central problems - aside from the sex comedy premise which has aged decidedly badly - is, of course, that he just isn't very comic. Which is actually rather odd, given the skill with which he had already demonstrated that he could be (e.g. the third segment of Waiting Women). The performances do have a certain relish in places, and the film is at its best when it's properly silly - those intertitles and some of the way the pretentious critic and charlatan composer Cornelius (played by Jarl Kulle [Don Juan in The Devil's Eye]) mugs at the camera even prefigure Monty Python (think Michael Palin). But, alas, not consistently enough. Maybe satire was never Bergman's forte - his comic gifts, such as they were, were wrly observational rather than acidic. The attacks here on modernist music are feeble rather than bitter. Even if I do have to admit that The Fish's Dream - Abstraction No. 14 (Cornelius' composition, so awful that it kills its performer) is a rather splendid title.