All These Women (1964)

Not rated, but apparently Disc 17 in the Ingmar Bergman collection is the sex comedy disc.  I applaud this movie so much.  It's all about sex, but the meta-narrative won't allow for anything visually scandalous.  One of the bits in the film is from the shot above, which uses a mild tango to represent the act of lovemaking.  There is one hard-to-see instance of rear nudity.  But we should all realize that the movie is non-stop talking about adultery, so that should be taken into consideration.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

Do you know what?  Thank you, Ingmar Bergman, for making All These Women.  I was starting to think that I was being a bit of a prude for constantly pointing out your obsession with infidelity.  And yet, here we are, another movie about infidelity and I like it.  For once, I'm not going to call myself a hypocrite.  If anything, All These Women justifies what makes a movie about infidelity work versus films that don't really play the motifs as well.

I always thought that Bergman couldn't do comedy.  I've now seen a good amount of Bergman comedies and most of them I consider pretty quaint.  They are tonally comedies, but the executions of them leave something to be desired.  Now, I will be the first to admit that comedy is incredibly subjective.  It totally is. Maybe I'm just wired for the zany absurdist sex comedy over something that is meant to be a wholesome family story about cheating on each other.  (I stand by that statement for a lot of Bergman's comedies.) 

I think it is the zaniness that makes All These Women work as a film.  I get the vibe that I might be the only person on the planet who liked this  movie more than some of the other Bergman standards.  I know.  There's something very appealing about the naysayer.  But let me cook a little bit.  (It should be noted that there is almost no chance that I'm going cook with the following words and you should ignore my valiant efforts to explain why I think this movie works.) All These Women, shy of the music cues and the fast-motion sequences (which I stand by my belief that fast motion jokes are never funny) read more like absurdist theatre.  I could honestly see a lot of this movie being performed on a stage.  I respect the fact that Bergman hasn't really abused his fourth wall all that much in his cinematic canon.  I'm going to give him a little bit of leeway when it comes to All These Women because he establishes the rules for this movie early on.  The only way that All These Women really works is if we abandon all pretence of reality.  From moment one, Bergman shows the widows of the maestro weeping over the unseen corpse.  They all say the same thing.  Part of the joke is that death has become a cliche, both in the world of All These Women and in our own reality.  We all come to the same epiphanies and that's something to be sent up to the gods of satire. 

But at the same time, the over-stressing of the same beats.  Even in its variety, it only highlights the sameness of it all.  As much as it is a commentary on death, the rules of All These Women play up the fact that none of this is based in reality.  With Bergman's use of intertitles to explain the passage of time, we realize that he's swinging with a sledgehammer, not performing surgery.  Bergman wants to say something and he wants to have fun while he's doing it.  I don't think I've really seen Bergman have fun before.  His other films are good and probably intellectually stimulating. But All These Women is a temper tantrum that results in hysterical, cathartic tears.  Now, part of it comes from the fact that this is a parody of Fellini's 8 1/2.  I really wish that I didn't look that part up because I like it better when the movie was just this absurdist romp.  Gosh darn it.  Can I still write this blog with my initial read?  

Okay, let's course correct.  If this is just a parody of Fellini, I have to take everything back.  I can see how this movie kind of sucks if that is the case.  All of the points that I gave Bergman are accidents.  The very thing that Bergman is mocking, if taken seriously, would be fascinating.  Let's pretend that it didn't exist and why making this a parody of something else only hurts the film.  From my perspective, who watched this ignorant of parody, saw this as a movie about the absurdity of the artist.  In my head, I couldn't help but put Bergman as the maestro.  The entire film, Cornelius is depserate to understand the Maestro, who never makes himself available to his own biographer.  Cornelius, himself, isn't all that obsessed with integrity.  He's there almost by commission.  Upon entering the estate, he confuses the butler for the Maestro himself.  (Canonically, the butler has a passing resemblance to the Maestro, whom we never see.)  He can't be that much of a fan.  Similarly, he's quickly distracted by the women that can probably only be described as a harem of muses.  As frustrated as Cornelius gets with the Maestro's isolation, he's more confused by the dynamic that these women have in the household.  It ultimately becomes a story about fandom with an artist versus the actual art itself.  When Cornelius is finally given the opportunity to interact with the Maestro's bizarre art, his death becomes the performance piece itself.  That's great.

And had this not been a parody of Fellini, I would have said that Bergman is taking the mickey out of himself.  We learn, when the artist is dead, that the artist himself didn't really matter.  Their grief is a kind of performance piece in and of itself.  They instantly adopt a new Maestro, whose face is visible immediately.  He's a child and we find out that the Maestro himself didn't matter, it's the community based around the maestro that matters.  It was the women in his life who made him who he is.  I can't help but see Bergman as that invisible Maestro.  This fandom around him becomes artificial and self-depricating.  Tying back to my initial statement, it makes the affairs quite silly.  The other films have always treated infidelity as a way of life. But if the Maestro is a stand in for a strawman, we realize that all this attention for someone who didn't matter, even sexual attention, is silly.  These are people who should be out there living full lives.  

But it's not Bergman, now is it?  It's Fellini.  And that's kind of spiteful.  Because what I read to be a commentary on the role of the artist isn't really a commentary.  It's a commentary on how someone else, someone specific, makes art.  Since 8 1/2 is the template of the movie, we can't slot the Beatles into the role of the Maestro as much as we can't really say that Bergman is just a guy making movies and he's been raised up on this golden pedestal.  That is so much more of a fun movie than "I'm just parroting something else."  I'm going to be critical of myself because who else would be critical of me.  I feel like I'm treating the entire concept of "parody" as less than BLANK.  Parody has its role and for all I know, that's what Bergman was shooting for.  But I think that All These Women just works better as satire than it does as parody.  It's silly.  It's fun.  It's self-depricating.  That's the kind of stuff I like.  But I have a feeling that I wasn't supposed to like this movie.  That makes me sad.  

Should I be sad for liking something that I wasn't supposed to like?  I don't know, man.  But I'm going to be picking this apart for a while.