The Touch (1971)

Rated R, as it absolutely should be.  I cannot stress enough that Ingmar Bergman keeps making movies about affairs and some get a little bit more...visual(?) than others.  Sometimes the affair is the B-story.  Not with The Touch.  This is just about an affair and there's a lot of sex in it, coupled with nudity.  Also, this is possibly the most unhealthy affair movie out there because a key component about this affair is how physically abusive the film is.  The movie dabbles in sexual assault and masochism.  There are also discussions of suicide.  There's nothing wholesome about this film.  R.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

It's official: I hate this film.

I have been more critical of Ingmar Bergman than I thought I would ever be as I make my way through this box set.  Before this box, I thought I actually mostly loved Bergman.  It's not that I hate Bergman.  I do hate this.  I find myself more angry at Bergman.  I am floored that I've gotten to this place in the box set where the guy who made The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander can get such a visceral reaction out of me that I can straight up say that something is outright bad.  I also can't help that a lot of my wrath towards this film comes from the fact that I keep watching him explore the same things, only each time get somehow more despicable with each viewing.

I have been writing this blog for a really long time at this point.  It's been at least ten years of writing this blog.  I've written about thousands of movies at this point.  Each one has gotten the same amount of attention that a student gives one of my assigned essays.  (Take from that what you will.) I'd like to think that I lean more into film analysis than opinion, but I don't deny that opinion plays an important role.  I don't want to review movies, even though that's what I inevitably end up doing between here and my Letterboxd account.  (Follow me at @thrusz for more of the same.) But the thing that's always been a love / hate thing about my writing is that I find morality to be a core component of how I view film.  I love talking about this kind of stuff.  I don't know what it is.  The really cynical part of me can't help but think that this is a high-horse situation.  But I don't know.  My wife says I capitalize the "J" in ENFJ, so maybe that's it.  I just find it all so interesting.  There has to be a consideration of whether or not I would ever want to hang out with the filmmakers based on the films they make.

Bergman probably hates himself.  I get that vibe.  Yes, he probably thinks that he is a genius.  I also think that he probably looks down on plebes out there.  I get it.  Being unique and brilliant must be incredibly lonely.  But after watching all of these films, especially juxtaposed to one another, he also seems to be trying to justify some pretty messed up behavior.  The most generous take on The Touch is that this is somehow a cautionary tale about the dangers of infidelity.  The reason that I use the term "generous" because I honestly don't believe it is meant to be a cautionary tale.  From Bergman's perspective, he wants complex characters.  David and Karin are complex characters.  He's creating this love story that is tragic for all of the wrong reasons and there's something that Karin would really appreciate about the film: the whole thing is masochistic.  

Yeah, David and Karin are complex, but that's mostly because they are completely unsympathetic.  This is a running motif throughout his films.  He keeps pushing the boundaries of how much the audience can take when it comes to making major characters completely unlikable.  Heck, I'm the guy who really likes stories about unlikable characters.  I'm in the Breaking Bad and Mad Men camp.  But when it comes to stories like The Touch, golly I want to scream at the camera.  A lot of romance stories use an affair as a component in the story.  Often, these characters are quite upset with their lives or their spouses.  Not Bergman.  Bergman keeps on finding pleasure in tearing apart what should be healthy relationships.  David confesses that he fell in love with Karin because of a moment of vulnerability when they met.  She seemed weak and that excited him.  It's a red flag, to be sure.  But I don't know how Bergman decided to put two completely horrible people in the same room together.  Karin, up to this point, admits that she had not had many lovers.  She actually seems quite pleased with her marriage --a point that Bergman seems to be going out of his way to establish --and that she isn't even all that attracted to David.  Sure, that will change by the end of the story.  But instead of a fairytale romance where the two discover something beautiful with one another, despite the fact that Karin seems to be arbitrarily nuking her family, their relationship keeps on getting worse and worse.

The thing that burns me up is the fact that all of this seems unnecessary.  Karin wasn't unhappy with her husband.  As I stressed, she wasn't even into David that much.  And then she only gets attracted to David when David is abusive and manic?  What kind of messed up story is this?  Again, I cannot stress that the tone is not that of a cautionary tale.  Instead, Bergman always kind of hovers in this place of talking about how humanity is comprised of terrible people.  Bergman is a bad guy.  Like, I'm reading more and more about Bergman and all of it is just leading me to think that he's an awful dude making stories.  Keeping all of that in mind, the story of a woman asking to be abused by a messed up dude comes across as something truly revolting.  Like, there's a line, right?  I loved Woody Allen.  But after I watched that doc, it really becomes hard to watch Woody Allen movies.  And as bad as Woody was, he never made a story like The Touch.  Golly, there's no level of brilliant filmmaking where I watch this movie and think "Romantic." 

Maybe it is a good thing that I have a Bergman movie where I'm not terribly conflicted about the whole thing.  It's a gross movie made by a gross dude who knows how to tell a story.  But it doesn't matter when a story is well presented.  Instead, we just have this narrative that makes me hate watch the whole thing.  It doesn't really matter that Karin leaves him at the end.  After all, she was given a reasonable ultimatum by Andreas and she still ignored him.  It's just an upsetting movie all the way through.