Bergman 27: The Touch (1971)

The panning this got on first release seems rather unfair to me. For much of the time it is a remarkably convincing portrait of an affair, and any linguistic stiffness is entirely plausible diegetically. (It doesn't help that there's some rather awkward dubbing, particularly early on.) There is extraneous material that doesn't seem to work (the letters delivered as talking heads, not a patch on Winter Light; the insects in the statue - both heavy-handed and rather obscure; and even the Holocaust references). But I think Elliott Gould is very fine, conveying both the character's self-indulgence and his genuinely damaged quality - both culpably childish and on the brink of mental illness. Bibi Andersson, despite being second choice (after Liv Ullmann, apparently), is rather quietly virtuosic, and von Sydow is as excellent as ever. The narrative might seem to give von Sydow a rather unpleasantly sanctimonious position as the man who understands that his wife is not nearly as emotionally mature as she thinks she is, but even this is undercut - or at least complicated - by the note of rather sadistic triumph that comes into his face in his confrontation with Gould.