Movie Enthusiast Issue 54: The Bergman Centennial Begins
Watching
Mrs. Hyde (2017)
Some movies are unclassifiable because they do startling new things with style and genre. Some are unclassifiable because they just aren’t very good.
Mrs. Hyde sees the always-watchable Isabelle Huppert slip into a Jekyll-and-Hyde role as a high school physics teacher electrocuted during a thunderstorm. Overnight she transforms from a stuttering and unconfident wallflower, easily bossed around by her students and equally hapless around adults her age, into the icy and self-assured Isabelle Huppert we all know and love (or know and admire from a careful distance). Occasionally she glows in the dark!
Serge Bozon, who wrote and directed, is first and foremost an actor. Mrs. Hyde is only his fifth directorial feature and second feature-length screenplay. He has a lot to learn. For instance, including a 15-minute-long geometry lesson at the center of your film does not automagically make your movie deep or challenging. On the other hand, the film’s shot like a watercolor painting with vivid moments of oil-like reds. There’s a disproportionate amount of artistry on display in the cinematography, which points here to a second major lesson of movie making: good looks can’t hide undercooked ideas.
A Summer’s Tale (1996) [rewatch]
Five lucky friends got to watch their first Rohmer with me when I screened this at my house last month. To my chagrin, consensus fell on the side of “this movie is too real to be totally enjoyable.” Okay sure, I get it. We can’t all have as high a tolerance for well-educated people in their twenties talking about their feelings as I do. Interestingly, my friends were most put off by the ending, which they felt lacked resolution. On the contrary, I’ve always read the ending as a perfect end to the circle of Gaspard’s unself-aware summer. It reads to me as a pretty firm indictment of Gaspard’s jerkish behavior and a tragic conclusion to Margot’s arc. She let herself get too attached to the idea of a summer romance with a cute boy she met on the beach, falling in love with him even after she learned enough about his modus operandi to see that he’s pretty pathetic. One of my friends not inaccurately pointed out that Gaspard would definitely be into Jordan Peterson if this were set in 2018. Rohmer made this movie when he was in his 70s, thus why it’s so wise in its portrayal of young adults and their indecisiveness. Maybe we’re all too much in thick of it to feel comfortable with the lack of complete resolution Rohmer, with age, seems to recognize as a feature, not a bug, of relationships and personal growth.
Wild Strawberries (1957)
The Ingmar Bergman Centennial has finally come to Washington, D.C.! The National Gallery kicked off a two-month-long retrospective of his work today with a 35mm screening of Wild Strawberries. At the end of his life, Dr. Eberhard Isak Borg is receiving an honorary degree and has to take a movie-length drive out to the city to claim it. Along the way he’s beset by visions and dreams of his past. In one, the film’s crowning sequence, he witnesses his childhood love Sara (Bibi Andersson) fall into the hands of his cousin Sigfrid, who would go on to marry her.
Sara and Sigfrid’s dalliance in the strawberry patch is succeeded in Isak’s vision by a dinner scene calibrated to perfection. Sara’s aunt rules her midsize Swedish family and their dinner table with an iron fist. Everyone says their prayers at her command and to her tempo. Her control over the flow of food and conversation doesn’t wane once everyone’s seated. For the duration of the meal, Bergman positions the camera at fixed distances from each of the diners around the table and match-cuts from person to person with metronomic precision as they pass the food and their pent-up emotions. He injects some sour humor in the person of Sara’s deaf uncle, who wields his ear trumpet like a weapon of war, and a set of twins whose glasses and braids outwardly reflect their obnoxiously nosy personalities. Hell is dinner with your extended family, as the saying doesn’t exactly go. We don’t break from the rigid editing until Sara, in a huff, springs from the table and runs off crying to the other room after the twins spill the beans that she and Sigfrid had stolen a kiss among the wild strawberries. (Hey, it’s the name of the film!) It’s a marvelous 10 minutes that showcases what Bergman does best: the perfect compositions, the complete control over the ebb and flow of a scene’s atmosphere, the camera that captures his characters’ heightened emotions while always moving in just the right way and positioning itself exactly where it needs to be.
Halfway through the second reel, right as Isak picked up Bibi Andersson and her merry band of existentialists, the sound started to cut out so the projectionist turned the audio off until the reel change. For fifteen minutes, I and the 400 or so people who had filled the room on this nearly 100° day sat in rapt silence, totally bewitched by the power of Bergman’s images (and the occasional witticism in the subtitles). I only counted a handful of walkouts before the sound returned for reel three. It’s such a treat to experience an old film exert its power on the attention of a modern audience as this one did.
Bergman has long been one of my blindspots. I had only seen The Seventh Seal and Persona back in my college days, because those were The Movies You’re Supposed to Watch When You’re in College. I’m eager to fill in the gaps in his filmography this summer. Summer Interlude, Cries and Whispers, and Autumn Sonata are high on my list. I’m also interested to see how I respond to Bergman’s philosophy now that my own beliefs are more mature than they had been when I first encountered him! I think there’s a good reason that Bergman has this reputation as a director the serious-minded student of cinema comes to in college. During Wild Strawberries, I started mulling over the tendency we sometimes have to conflate an artist’s serious treatment of philosophical and theological questions with a correct treatment of same. Some might say this is the problem besetting Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, but you’ll see what I have to say about that later this month, when my essay on it should finally be published.
Reading
“Jaoudé has been collecting film posters, magazines, lobby cards and even tickets since the mid 70s when as a teenager he contracted the virus of cinephilia. Since then, he started attending every screening he could in the many cinemas that could be found in Beirut at the time, especially in Hamra, the downtown neighborhood where his archives currently are. He shows us photos of the movie theatres where he would go to watch films and then ask for their posters, places that are no longer there, erased by the amnesiac fury of war and urban speculation. The oldest poster he has dates back to 1932 and it’s of an Egyptian film called Al Warda al-Baydaa (The White Rose); of the over 20,000 posters in his collection most are from movies that have literally vanished in the meantime.”
—images from the largest movie poster collection in the Arab world
Coming Soon
For his next trick, Taika Waititi will play Adolf Hitler, imaginary friend, in Jojo Rabbit, co-starring Scarlett Johansson.
I suspect that all of my subscribers already heard the news, but just in case: Greta Gerwig is eying an adaptation of Little Women, with Meryl Streep, Emma Stone, Saoirse Ronan, and Timothée Chalamet attached to star.
Did you know they’re making a mixed live-action/animated Sonic the Hedgehog movie? I did not want to know this! Jim Carrey will play Dr. Robotnik. Maybe they’ll use a real hedgehog for Sonic?