Warlock Overboard

By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan The Passion of Anna (1963) Directed by

Most of the time I’m completely on board with my favorite movie-making warlock, Ingmar Bergman. This is true even when he’s scaring the bejesus out of me! (See my discussion of Persona.) Last time we did a Foreign Classic, we talked about The Silence, which I thought was a lot of intriguing ideas wrapped up in a fairly dull film, but that’s about as unenthusiastic as I’ve ever been toward Bergman’s work. Until now! Now I have seen The Passion of Anna and I must say that even my favorite movie- making warlock must have had his off-days, because this film is rather a mess.

But since this is Bergman’s work, it is what we’d now call a “hot mess,” like, it’s got all this interesting stuff happening, it’s just put together so crazily that you can’t say that there’s anything very good about it. I feel as if Mr. Bergman gave up on this one halfway through, but figured that since his movies were normally fairly odd, he could go ahead and release it, and no one would notice any difference.

Got three words for you: . Those words are a spell that can be cast on a film. Oh sure, you might say they’re also the name of an actor that Bergman liked to use, but I tell you what, Max is a force to be reckoned with. Even when he’s playing a crybaby loser like the guy in this film, he’s still such a powerful actor that a camera could just follow him around and he’d make ordinary life seem enormous. We begin this film with his character, 40ish single man Andreas, repairing the roof on his little country house, and I’ll be darned if it isn’t kind of fascinating to watch him just doing that. Here is a man at work at a job he doesn’t really feel like doing, his mind maybe wandering even as he proceeds with his work, absently holding a nail in his teeth or watching with mild exasperation as he drops his bucket of mortar. It’s too bad we can’t just watch Andreas doing stuff on his own for the rest of the movie, but we have to bring some crazy sisters in because Bergman has a thing for crazy sisters.

Liv Ullman turns up. She’s Anna, whose husband and child were killed in the car accident that has also left her with a prominent limp. She lives nearby with her sister and brother- in-law. She wants to use Andreas’s phone. Thus begins their epic love story, I guess. Well here’s the strange thing. Andreas pals up with the sister and brother-in-law, Eva () and Elis (), and he ends up actually having an extramarital affair with Eva.

Andersson, who is always beautiful, never looked quite so gorgeously feminine as she did in this movie. She’s very sexy but she’s also loopy. Her major bitch is that she loves her husband all kinds of crazy ways, but for some reason this makes her miserable because she can’t “prove it” to him or he can’t “see her love” or their love is “without allergens,” etc., etc., etc. I mean, God only knows what her problem is, but she cries about it a lot and then jumps into bed with Andreas. Yeah, well, remember: Max Von Sydow.

Elis, the husband, is his own kind of oddball. He likes to collect photographs of people’s faces and has an alarmingly extensive collection, rows and rows of boxes of pictures. He wants to take more pictures, this time of Andreas. I would hesitate to be his subject, because you’d expect a guy like this to keep people’s actual faces in one of those boxes as well. He’s got that creepy serial-murderer politeness and superiority about him. Small wonder that Eva wants to help Andreas “repair his roof.” Hur hur.

Anyway, Eva and Andreas’s fling is kind of hot, as far as we can see. Yet, instead of anything much happening beyond an initial afternoon romp (at the end of which, he gives her a dog for company), it’s suddenly several months later. Eva is saying to an uncomfortable Andreas, “I know about you and Anna, and it’s fine with me. I’m happy for you both.” Anna Before you break up with the girl driving you home, make and Andreas are apparently sure she’s got the vehicular homicide out of her system. living together and have been for some time. When or how this happened, I have not a clue. Eva promptly disappears from the film, even though Bibi Andersson is interviewed talking about the character and what she predicts will happen to Eva in the future.

Yeah, it’s one of those Bergman things, where he reminds us that we’re watching a movie by conducting cast interviews right smack in the middle of the story (he does the same with Max, Ms. Ullman and Mr. Erlander at different points in the film). “Talk about your character.” Max Von Sydow does have a fairly interesting thing to say about portraying Andreas: that a difficult task for an actor is to portray a lack of emotion. He needn’t worry; his performance is scary good. I also admire Ms. Andersson’s stagecraft, having carefully thought out her character Eva as having a future far beyond the storyline. It’s really too bad we don’t get to see any of it.

For the remaining slog of the film, Anna and Andreas are living together. They fight and fight and fight. For all I can tell, they hate each other. If I thought Eva was loopy, she’s got nothing on Anna, who is certifiable. Andreas is certifiable for keeping her in his house.

Their relationship is a real puzzler. Bergman gets up close in their faces and has them monologue like a James Bond villain, only less about world domination and more about their own inner despair or their ideas of fidelity or the true shape of a pear, or basically, whatever would be the most boring thing to hear about. Andreas feels like a failure as a man because his wife left him and he’s never been able to hold a job, or he keeps spilling his mortar, something like that. Anna is delusional because she thinks she and her husband had a perfect relationship when it’s very likely that he was going to leave her and she killed him for it.

On the desolate chunk of seaside where they all live, someone is going around viciously killing animals. (Animal lovers, you might want to exercise a little caution in watching this. Be prepared to see some unhappy things and remind yourself: it’s only a movie.) There is a cranky old recluse living nearby and everyone wants to blame him for the killings. Andreas is his only friend. The pressure gets to be too much and the cranky old recluse kills himself, but not before writing a boring letter to Andreas, which Andreas then has to read aloud to us, sigh, and then the whole storyline with the animal killer goes nowhere. Hell, maybe the cranky old recluse really was killing the poor critters.

Anna and Andreas break up. Boy, is it a mess when they do. They do have quite a row. Andreas really should know better than to make Anna mad when she’s driving a car; she’s already done away with one man like this. Luckily he manages to stop her from killing them both and then he gets out of the car in a huff, then he paces up and down in a huff, then the movie ends in a huff. The film says the adorably untranslated word “SLUT” at the end; it is Swedish for “OUT” or “END” but I always get a stupid laugh out of it, and this time I thought it was referring to Anna so it was even more funny.

This one was a headache. Bergman can direct a weirdly unforgettable headache, and it will have some moving acting in it for sure, but it’s still a headache. Perhaps we are meant to sympathize with how it feels to have a relationship with the certifiable, delusional monologue-ing crazy sister. Mission accomplished; I feel the pain. SLUT.