After the Rehearsal (1984)

R for sexual scenarios and almost-going-out-of-its-way-to-get-there nudity.  I would say that this would be simply a heavy and slightly vulgar dialogue-driven film if it wasn't for this character revealing that her body is still appealing, despite her advanced age.  I don't think I'm crazy here, but there's at least a hint of both a spiritual and a physical incest element to the story as well.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

If I really lock in, I can get a whole bunch of this done before I need to start my day.  I actually got here at a reasonable hour.  I don't seem to be too distracted.  I have a lovely cup of tea steeping and I'm playing Mozart.  Honestly, shy of any interruptions, I might be able to knock out a blog about a shorter film that I have a lot of opinions about.

At one point in my life, realistically around my late teens to my early twenties, this might have been one of my favorite movies.  It would have been a snobby pick on my part in an attempt in order to seem cultured, but so much of this movie screams that time in my life.  I was teaching at a theatre school and taking theatre classes in college.  I was mildly obsessed with a text that I actually currently use (now sparingly) in my performing arts class.  I'm talking about Boleslavsky's Acting -The First Six Lessons.  For those who are unaware of this, it is a short play between a director and his female lead.  In the play, the very lofty director acts as a sage, catching his well-intentioned actress in some traps about acting.  (He's not actually directing her in a play in the play.  She simply comes to him for advice.)  If I was more critical, I would accuse the play of misogyny.  But that also transitions me into After the Rehearsal.  The fine folks at Criterion knew what they were doing when they paired this and The Magic Flute onto one disc.  I actually thought that this was going to be a literal companion piece to The Magic Flute considering that I caught that Erland Josephson was in the audience for The Magic Flute.  For the first chunk of After the Rehearsal, it seems like a spiritual adaptation of Boleslavsky.  There's an elder director talking to a well-meaning actress about her craft and how she's really not all that good at it yet.

I don't know if this is going to surprise anyone, but it doesn't stay that way.  I surprised me.  In what I've learned to be a typical Bergman fashion, the film shifts into treating this as a therapy session where Vogler (a name that he seems to use a lot in his films) stands in as an avatar for Bergman as artist and letch.  I'm going to approach how this movie views him as an artist first because I struggle more with that than the letcher part of Bergman.  Bergman, at this point in the box set, is the Bergman of renown.  He is always in his own shadow and there's something very tired about not having real peers when it comes to talking about art.  I'm synthesizing my thoughts on Bergman-as-Vogler using all of the works where an aging artist is paradoxically genius-and-child.  I get the vibe that, as much as Bergman acknowledges that he's potentially one of the most knowledgable directors of all time, he also seems himself as a fraud.  For all of the time that Vogler talks to Anna, he is giving great technical advice for the character and the choices that she should make.  But he is also someone who cannot handle basic human interaction.  Like many of Bergman's other characters, he is cruel.  I don't love this part of the theatre, but many of the greats tend to be more brutally honest than they have to be.  I choose those words because while honesty is important in the performing arts, many of the productive directors have that switch flipped on at the expense of their performers.  Yeah, they get great performances out of their actors, but often at great and irresponsible emotional strain.

There's something damning about the entire After the Rehearsal experience from a directing perspective.  I'm going to say that I overall liked it. But if one half of this story is the story of art and the artist, After the Rehearsal is not Bergman's best work.  I applaud that Bergman presents this almost exclusively as a play.  The metatextual play-within-a-film works really well for this because the content of this story belongs on the stage.  When he made The Magic Flute, he blended cinema with the stage to pull people deeper into the story through unobtrusive craftsmanship.  Bergman doesn't do that too much with After the Rehearsal.  The problem with that is that he breaks his own rule occasionally, and it is incredibly glaring.  Ultimately, this could have been a real stage performance.  But I can almost accuse Bergman of cowardice.  In the midst of these performances, which we see happen in real time on stage, he occasionally has Vogler's inner monologue comment on what is happening.  These moments are more tell-not-show, leaving the viewer with little to interpret.  He tells us what we should be thinking about both himself and the other characters when the interaction between the characters is already doing that.   If this is going to be a play, let it be a play.  We don't need that element telling us what to interpret.  I think he watched the film and kind of Blade Runnered it.   Plays are hard.

The bigger issue is that Bergman is just being that gross old man that keeps justifying terrible behavior.  As Bergman gets older, the stories kind of get more pathetic.  I do have to add yet another disclaimer here:  I don't know who Bergman was as a man.  I tried watching special features and documentaries about him, but they seem overwhelmingly fawning over the man's genius.  He was a genius and history puts in him that context.  I know that he tended to have open relationships.  I know that he was married at least three times.  I shouldn't be one to judge.  The issue is that he keeps imbuing his characters with traits that have created a narrative for me.   When he was a younger guy, his sexual proclivities were about adultery between two people of equal age.  As he gets older, there's almsot an obsession with the notion that younger women are attracted to older men.  The thing is...he seems wildly aware that he's being kind of a perv.   

Okay, I'm trying not to judge, but I'm going to judge.  (My wife says that the "J" in ENFJ should always be capitalized for me.)   Bergman is an emotional child.  In the wake of all of his artistic intelligence, he seems to thrive in the same emotions that I had in my early 20s.  Again, there's a reason that I would have loved this movie back then.  There's this idea that the protagonist needs to torture himself and others because he's attracted to the worst idea ever.  One of the running motifs in the film is that Vogler is unable to control his baser desires, even if he vocally says that he's in charge.  He's attracted to Anna, but he also maintained a sexual relationship with Anna's mother, Rakel.  Even the timetable implies that Anna could technically be his daughter.  While it is unlikely, it is also not entirely impossible.  But the frustrating thing about Vogler --and using Vogler as an avatar for Bergman -- is the idea that Vogler is the one who is both torturing himself and indulging himself because he is somehow superior in the relationship.  This is probably my most frustrating thing about my constant commentary on Bergman's relationships in these movies.  Very few relationships in Bergman movies are about vulnerability.  If anything, they are incredibly guarded relationships.  Both of these people have people at home.  Vogler has a wife.  Anna has a significant other who got her pregnant.  Yet, the two torture each other when, honestly, a little bit of vulnerability would go a long way. And I know that there's crying and self-rebuke.  But just the fact that the role of elder and youth are the only personalities that these two take on.  The fact that Vogler goes into the "fatherhood" element of the whole thing is even worse.  He's aware of the metaphor of what is going on and he's still indulging the conversation.

So it's interesting.  I don't deny that.  I love the theatre.  I love emotion. But I can't stand that Bergman keeps exploring the same stuff that should be explored in therapy.  It's a weird assumption that I'm going to watch a later Bergman film and find an older character discussing his romantic relationship with a younger character, who will automatically be obsessed with the older man.  It never feels healthy, and yet will always be assumed to happen.