R for animal cruelty (which, because it is 1969 Sweden, you know is actual animal cruelty), violence, domestic abuse, suicide, gore, sex, nudity, and I think some language. In a very specific way, this might be the least family friendly of the Bergman films, even if tonally it feels very much like Bergman's other films. It's oddly brutal, but it also has that specific red color of blood that films of the '60s had.
DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman Welp, my wife and I were supposed to go see The Brutalist tonight, but then YET ANOTHER KID started throwing up. It seems like every time I have the opportunity to do something fun for myself, one of the kids gets a G.I. bug. Hopefully we'll have another opportunity to go see The Brutalist, mainly because it's three-and-a-half hours. But at least this gives me a moment to try and play catch up with the blog. (Note: the kid is throwing up half an hour apart, so I have the in-between time to write this. Also, this is the oldest, so she doesn't mind having a little bit of space away from me.) The Passion of Anna is in that weird spot between being totally cryptic and being quasi-understandable. Sometimes I feel dumb for not understanding what is going on in his movies. Listen, I can't be alone in that feeling. But with The Passion of Anna, I apparently get a pass. I'm looking for any freedom to be wrong here. But there were spots in the film where major changes happened in the story and nothing really indicated what happened to change the dynamics of the character. So you know what I did? I did what I do every time I don't understand something in the plot: I looked it up. And do you know what I discovered in my follow-up reading of The Passion of Anna? I found out that lots of people don't understand this movie. Even the die hard Bergman fans are trying cobble something together. And even beyond that? I felt like I was comfortable with the majority of it. So what I'm going to do is speculate my analysis and just live with the notion that I could be way wrong, but that almost everyone is way wrong with this movie. Part of it comes with the history of the film. Again, I read some stuff on this one. Apparently, The Passion of Anna was kind of scrapped together because Bergman didn't want to burn the house from Shame down. He made a very unofficially, tenuous sequel to Shame and made it super duper weird. I'm so glad that I knew this because a lot of this movie does feel like a hodge-podge of half-ideas. Normally, I would be annoyed by this. It's not like it thrills me, but each time I pivoted to meet the half-idea, I tended to enjoy what I was actually watching. Maybe I'm just growing more patient with things that I watch, especially considering I'm this deep down the Bergman hole. To a certain extent, this movie is a lot of hat-on-hats. Part of it comes from ideas that would almost benefit from being short stories. (I just found out that Bergman turned this into a novella, clearing up some of the stuff in the movie. Nifty!) But this movie tries to take on a lot and quasi-sort-of tie all of these loose ends together in a unified narrative. It's not like it fails, but it is almost like none of the ideas are thoroughly explored. Heck, if I didn't watch this after Shame, I wouldn't have even gotten some of the character relationships that were carrying over from that movie. The most clear and defined thing that comes out of this movie is Anna's troubled history. I'm going to assume that Anna is the animal killer. We don't get a lot of reasoning for Anna being the animal killer. There's just the implication that she is the one who is saddled with the term "physical and psychological violence" repeated throughout the movie. We keep seeing that image that we get from her handbag, which is odd that she carries around this very damning letter from her husband. We even get it spelled out for us that she is probably responsible for her husband and child's death at the end of the movie. Now, I find Anna as a murderer an interesting story. But The Passion of Anna is almost just introducing that as opposed to really exploring what is going on. I think the title was From the Life of the Marionettes. In that movie, Bergman goes deep into the psychosis that leads someone to break out into violence. Instead, it's something that we have to color Anna with. I don't hate that as a concept. The idea that someone in your own house could be a deranged killer is a fascinating thing. But we never really get a resolution beyond "Anna is not a nice person." It's odd because Anna acts fairly nice throughout the story. I mean, she acts nice for a Bergman movie. We have a lot of Andreas and Anna yelling at each other and that's part of being in a Bergman movie. From that story we get possibly the most human story, the story of vigilante violence. Honestly, that made the movie worth watching. In a desperate attempt to find this animal murderer, the town turns on Verner. I think it's Verner. I'm sorry. It's a bad photo on IMDB. But there's this tale of this sweet old man who has become a hermit after he loses a lawsuit. He befriends both Anna and Andreas and that's a really sweet story. His death comes across as tragic because there's this wide gulf between the perception of the mentally ill and the reality of this sad old man who just has nowhere to go. If Erik Hell plays the part I'm thinking of, good on him, man. The character carries this potent-yet-hidden gratitude to Andreas for treating him like a person. When the letter is read describing the horrors he went through by two men in the town, that's a story in itself. That stuff is fascinating. I'll even say some of the weirder stuff in the movie is actually pretty rad. I probably wouldn't have done some of this, but I'm not Ingmar Bergman. (And because I'm not Ingmar Bergman, that also means that I'm going to make a movie devoid of infidelity and cruelty once in a while.) I do have to admit that I weirdly like the meta interviews that happen in the midst of the movie. For those not in the know, Bergman stops his narrative to interview the cast members of The Passion of Anna. I mean, I'm going to start referring to them as the Ingmar Bergman players because it's Max Von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, and Liv Ullmann who are in every freaking Bergman movie at this point. But the movie stops and we get the actors discussing their characters as if we're watching a press junket or DVD special features. Golly, if this wasn't made in 1969, I would love to think that this was a commentary on our obsession with unpacking films through special features. Maybe I'm the exact audience that Bergman is criticizing, but I weirdly appreciated insights into these characters from the actors' perspectives. Because Bergman doesn't necessarily show us a lot of the vital information needed to unpack the film, the stuff that the actors give us make the movie have a little bit of weight to it. I understood more of the film because these moments existed. I know. It may have been satire or a thought experiment. But this dope liked it for what it was. It also gave my mind a way to segment the films into quarters so I could appreciate tonal shifts. The stuff that didn't really click with me were Elis and Eva. Again, I'm complaining about a movie segments that seem intentionally done. But Elis and Eva don't even fit with the rest of the story. It's almost like Bergman is falling back on comfortable content, which I've now seen beaten to death. I've not made my thoughts on Bergman's obsession with toxic polygamy secret. Once or twice, it is a fascinating study. But he keeps trying to normalize infidelity. And the thing is, Eva is barely a character after Andreas has an affair with her. Elis speaks cryptically about the role of the still image. (Okay, I get the metaphor of that one.) But Elis and Eva are almost excuses to have two actors in a movie with his other buddies. Narratively, it is almost contrasting to what the rest of the story is about. I'd also like to point out that Erland Josephson still gets under my skin since Scenes from a Marriage. I know. I should separate them. He just keeps playing these unlikable intellectuals and it drives me crazy. I say these scenes are counterproductive because the relationship with Anna, who is key to the understanding of this movie, almost takes a backseat for the first third of the film. Anna and Andreas are just together and the Eva story disappears. There's never any consequences of that relationship outside of Andreas lying to Anna once. It doesn't come into play. It's almost like Bergman is incapable of making a movie without these themes. It's weird that I liked this. It feels underbaked at every step and I know that I can't say that because it's Bergman. But I did like it. It was hard to grasp as a whole, but the bits really worked. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
February 2025
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