A Ship to India (1947)

Not rated, but this movie has some content that needs to be addressed.  The movie, especially for 1947, is incredibly colored by sexuality.  Most of that sexuality is incredibly unhealthy, including an attempted rape sequence that is woefully ignored and swept under the rug.  There's also an attempted murder and an attempted suicide.  Every horrible thing that can be attempted, they attempt.  

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

Okay, two movies that have relationships that the kid tries to steal the parent's relationships is a coincidence.  Three involves me really questioning what's going on with Ingmar Bergman.  I know that all 39 movies in the box set can't be about can't be about falling in love with your parent's boyfriend or girlfriend.  They just can't.  I refuse to believe it.  I'm actually running out of things to talk about with this very specific trope that seems to be pervading Ingmar Bergman movies.  This is barely a trope in anything else and this is in three Bergman movies out of my marathon of three-so-far?  Nope.  Nothing doing.

But we hit a sweet spot with Bergman for me. This is exactly what I want out of Ingmar Bergman. (Okay, not exactly.  I'll touch on that later.)  I knew from watching the Early Bergman Eclipse series that I liked a lot of Bergman's early work.  I wrote about this in my Crisis blog.  But I also knew that Crisis, while not a dumb movie by any means, was a little bit dumb compared to Bergman's other work.  I kind of expected that, when I revisited this era of Bergman, that many of his movies would be slightly dumber than his lofty classics.  It's not like A Ship to India is his most brilliant work.  I have to admit that there are things that could be elevated.  But A Ship to India is leaps and bounds more intellectually stimulating than Crisis was.  Only made a year apart, Bergman seems to be developing into the director that has placed him in the annals of cinematic history.  There's complexity and a richness to his shots.  The story is deep and challenging. But what I really like about A Ship to India is the idea that it both emotionally rich while being kind of a heady film.

I know that I'm fighting the clock.  I fell down a YouTube hole, so there's a good chance that I'm not going to finish this blog in time for my next class.  It's not really my fault that Seth Meyers interviewed Ncuti Gatwa on his show and that there was a clip on my front page.  That needed to get watched.  Anyway, I do want to talk about one thing that really bothers me about this movie before I talk about the complexity of the film.  At one point, Johannes, the deformed protagonist, after being dressed down by his father for no healthy reason, decides to attempt to rape Sally, the love interest of the movie.  Not that this really changes anything, but Sally and Johannes have no real prior relationship.  Sally is Johannes's father's mistress.  But he actively tries to rape her.  She screams and claws and tries to get out of there.  Johannes is only stopped by his mother, who points out that Johannes is drunk and that he would regret his actions. Now, the purpose of this scene is not to generate sympathy for Sally, who was almost raped.  The purpose of this scene is to generate empathy for Johannes, who is so deformed that he's reached the end of his rope.

The gross part of me wants to say "It was 1947.  It's not like he's a bad guy."  That scene colors the rest of the movie for me.  This is a movie I like that has layers of complexity.  I wish I could say that this moment was part of that complexity, but the movie really just gives Johannes a free pass after this moment because he didn't actually succeed in the rape.  They have a straight up conversation where Johannes asks Sally not to hold his previous night's behavior against him.  She smiles, thinking he's just a sad charming little lad. It's a weird take.  It does defintely put a dent in this movie, which I'm already rating pretty high on Letterboxd.  If it was part of the story and something that defined Johannes and Sally's relationship for the rest of the film, I'd be way less taken aback by this scene.  Nope.  Let's ignore it.  It was just a beat of characterization that was meant to elicit empathy for this hunchbacked kid who has a hard life. 

Also, for a movie that really stresses how ugly Johannes is, he's the most handsome ugly dude you've ever seen.  He's got a hunch, but it's pretty mild.  That's about it.

Anyway, back to the story.  What makes me excited to unpack this movie is Sally.  Johnannes reads exactly what you'd expect him to be.  He's the most archetypal protagonist, shy of the sexual assault.  He's downtrodden and (again, that scene removed) morally upright for most of the film.  He hates his own appearance and we instantly have a Beauty and the Beast dynamic between Johannes and Sally. But what I really like about the movie is that Sally isn't hard to pin down.  She initially leaves her own life behind as a cabaret dancer to join Blom, Johannes's father.  (I know Blom is their last name, but he's referred to as "Blom" a lot in the movie.)  She clearly doesn't love him.  He's an old man losing his vision. That's sad, but Blom is also a terrible human being.  When Johannes starts directing attention to Sally, she reprioritizes her life.  She only left the cabaret with Blom because he was going to take her away from her terrible life.  She was, in all essence, prostituting herself for the sake of a life somewhere else.  But Johannes seemed like more of a mark than Blom, who was too volitile to predict (again, Johannes did try to rape her, which is a weird call on her part, but it's the logic of the film).

She confesses to Alice that she does not love Johannes.  This is a woman who has a husband cheating on her and having his mistress live with them.  She has defended the value of a child born with a physical deformity who hates himself.  She thought that she might have had this win and Sally just straight up says that she doesn't love Johannes.  I mean, that's fair.  But there's the "I don't love him yet" of reality and the "I don't love him" of "I'm just using him to escape." She took his virginity so he would stay devoted to her.  It should make her unredeemable, but it absolutely doesn't in a weird way.  Part of that comes from the structure of the piece. The movie is bookended in the present day and the middle of the film is a flashback to the meat of the relationship stuff.  We know that Sally goes off the deep end in the present. Something is truly off with her and that's why we have so much flashback.

This scene does the best kind of muddying that I've ever seen in what could be considered a romance story.  Sally is upfront with her intentions.  She's been dealt a bad hand and she'll do anything to escape it.  But Sally and Johannes, for the rest of the film in the flashback, hit it off.  Lots of stuff happens.  Heck, Blom tries to kill his kid and then he tries to commit suicide as the cops catch up to him.  That's a lot to take in.  Sally and Johannes continue to foster their relationship.  When Johannes leaves to secure his fortune, she seems to hate him for it, even though he promises to return as soon as he can to take care of her.  Now where this movie gets gloriously messy is her rationale.  I think it more say more about the viewer than it does about the movie to break this section down.  (Note:  I 1000% didn't finish during my time to write.  This is where I picked up.)

A romantic has to believe that when Sally claims that she didn't love Johannes, she was lying to herself.  For them, the course of the story is the discovery that Johannes was always her true love.  Just because he can offer her freedom from this life of misery doesn't mean that the feelings that she harbors (pun intended) can't be love.  Myself? I'm romantic, but not when it comes to movies. This is a story about people using people.  When I see Sally curled up on the floor screaming at Johannes, it's because he left her behind to deal with poverty in her own way.  When she refuses to go with him, despite the overly cheerful ending where she turns her frown upside-down, it's because there's spite to her.  It's not that she's had her heart broken.  It's because she lost out on all she invested with him to get out of there.  It's bleak to me.  If anything, the happy ending is just there to put a bow on a complex situation.  But I believe her when she says that she doesn't love Johannes.  It makes the story so much more interesting.

There is also a beat that almost shocks me about the message of the film.  In the last few minutes of the movie, in the present timeline, Johannes tells Sally that she needs to get out of this place before she becomes so angry and spiteful like Johannes's father.  Now, Blom is pretty unlikable.  He's so unlikable that you take no pity for his future blindness.  But I always saw Blom's real cruelty in the fact that he openly states that his family is not enough for him. Yet, the message is that wanderlust needs to be satiated. That's a weird take from the movie.  Sure, if I'm trying to meet Bergman where he's at, I can see that Blom became so bitter and spiteful because he felt trapped in his life.  But to have a message to Sally that she should go before she becomes like Blom almost takes the onus off of Blom to begin with.  Part of the odd logic is that Blom's family caused Blom to be the monster that he became.  That's screwed up, right?

But see, this is all analysis stuff.  I love that I had a narrative that I could get behind and still question choices that go into those moments.  A Ship to India might not be the most complex thing in the world, but it also offers something different than a standard melodramatic narrative.  It gives me stories while still begging me to be engaged.  I love that.