Waiting Women / Secrets of Women (1952)

Not rated, but it has nudity, that's for sure.  Once again, this is a story about casual cruelty in relationships.  There are times when the movie actually seems quite tame and other times where the film feels quite vulgar.  There is an entire sequence that is kinda / sorta about suicide, so that should be taken into account before sitting down to watch it.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

In these times of strife, I sometimes lose track of when the Academy Award nominations come through.  I got so many Breaking News stories to my watch that the Academy Awards didn't even come through as a blip.  It took a coworker to bring that to my attention.  So I have to mentally get myself together.  There's going to be a lot of watching.  There's going to be a lot of writing.  I have to be in the writing mood for a while.  So I have to apologize to Assassin's Creed: Shadows for getting so close to the end while simultaneously throwing my watching queue into the bin.  I might watch the other Bergman on the disc just to torture myself, but then it's going to be all new stuff.  We'll see how I survive.  The plan is to watch Marty Surpreme tonight.

I'm almost at the end of the line when it comes to the Bergman set.  I may have seen the most Bergman movies out of anyone I know (maybe Greg excluded).  I have to start making some swings to make sense out of his work as a whole.  The easy read is to only look at motifs.  I mean, Waiting Women might be a great movie to start closing up shop on Bergman because, in many ways --outside of visual elements --it is quintessential Bergman.  It has all of it in there.  But what I'm most referring to is the fact that Bergman, once again, really hammers home the notion that everyone cheats.  I've written blog after blog about this and my main leap --which I admit is more of a hop --is that Bergman is justifying his own selfish behavior.  I'm sure that's true.  The reason I said it is because it's the Occam's Razor answer.  We know that he had multiple women in his life.  He makes movies about infidelity.  I applied the Woody Allen model of "Methinks [he] doth protest too much" to Bergman and that's fine. 

But Waiting Women brought up the next stage I should be looking at.  I'm not saying I agree with Bergman in the least, but Waiting Women might give me context for a lot of his other films.  It's weird that the one that most people haven't heard of might give me insight into what Bergman is trying to tell me with these stories of romantic cruelty.  Bergman might be trying to explore a complex idea by showing its negatives.  I'm going to state something paradoxical in the hopes that, by writing it out, I will be able to make the idea tangable.  

Bergman is making movies damning the Hollywood romance to explain that romance exists, but not in the way that we've all glorified it.  One thing that we have to probably agree on for this argument to work is that humanity, especially individuals, are incredibly selfish.  I don't see this.  I know that there are people out there who are as selfish as the characters that he portrays on screen.  But Bergman also makes practically everyone in his stories devoted only to self-interest.  Even the characters who voice opposition to selfishness often take selfish routes, like Rakel.  Rakel maintain a platonic relationship with Kaj, knowing the two had a romantic history years ago.  When Kaj makes a move on her (a move that borders on assault), she tells him that she loves her husband and that she couldn't cheat on him.  (In reality, she had cheated on him once before and couldn't live with the shame.) Let's use Rakel's story as our evidence so I don't get too lost in the weeds here.  (For those who are reading this blind, the film is borderline an anthology story with a throughline of the women all being in-laws.)  

Bergman seems to use Rakel's ignorance to criticize her and he uses Eugen's victimhood as a full on damnation of traditional romance.  Be aware, I can't help but imbue my own sense of morality, especially when it comes to romance, when it comes to writing about this movie.  I think I'm more critical of Bergman's attitude that these are universal problems.  Anyway.  Rakel, being more traditionally romantic, confesses to Eugen about their afternoon tryst.  Eugen flies into a rage, grabbing a shotgun and threatening to kill himself.  He then starts shooting at Raj and Raken.  If the story ended up there, you'd think that Bergman was just telling the story of an affair gone wrong.  It's always the takeaways that the narrator gives afterwards.  You would think that after a spouse tried to kill you post-affair, that would be the end of the relationship.  Instead, in the post-script to the story, Raken reveals that she and Eugen stayed together and that their marriage was as healthy as it had ever been.  Bergman still damns Eugen for his violent reaction to the notion of being cheated on, having Raken confess that their relationship is closer to that of parent and child rather than equals.  She likes taking care of him and it brings her joy, which is super gross to me.

But the same takeaway can be said for the other women at the table.  Marta had to give birth alone because Martin was throwing a temper tantrum of being borderline disinherited.  Maj, the younger sister, is impressed by this story, implying that she celebrates the feminist attitude that Marta has of having a child by herself and living life her way.  Instead, we find out that Marta married Martin and is happy with him.  The same thing holds true for Karin's story.  Karin tricks her husband Fredrik into confessing his own adultery.  Karin's scene, by the way, is the most playful of the group, trapping the couple in an elevator full of wacky circumstances.  But as she keeps getting details about Fredrik, she keeps loving him all the more.  Karin reads as the most mature of the group, never really giving into the miseries that comes with marriage.  It actually seems like she changes Fredrik for the better once they are freed from the elevator.  But Fredrik immediately goes for a work call after returning to the apartment, implying that he'll never change.

And that's kind of the message:  the only women who are happy in their marriages are the ones who put up with the crap that their husbands sling their way.  They won't change, so the only thing that they can change are their own attitude.  Now, I hate this messaging.  It's been getting me angrier as I've been watching these films. But it is also oddly --and ignorantly --flattering to the notion of women.  Again, I cannot protest enough (as I posted that Hamlet quote earlier) that this is a gross message, but the implication that women find a way to mature their love has a little bit of a silver lining.  The men in these stories are all portrayed as children and the women are the ones who grow as people.  Sure, some of that comes in because the women of the narrators of their own experiences (which were written by a man...).  

Maybe there's something to accepting your spouse's flaws.  I don't hate that as an idea.  But there's also the understanding that Bergman seems to miss and that is the notion that people grow together.  In these stories, the women are expected to be the anchors of the relationship and the men are too foolish to see what they have in front of them.  There's almost the expectation that "men be cheatin'" and that's how life is.  I don't hate that the movie has a commentary on mature versus immature love.  If the mission statement is to say that the Hollywood romance is garbage, by all means.  But I don't love that Bergman is weighting the scales in his favor so much.