mkl-2

It's the story of a married woman falling in love with another man. The married couple - Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson - does live in fine rapport, their personalities matching well. Both are quiet, contemplative, and very rational persons, not liable to act spontaneous. The intruder - Elliott Gould - on the idyll which they embody together with their teenaged daughter is in contrast an impetuous man, uncompromising, overbearing, and tormented by inner contradictions and compulsions. Andersson tells him at one point that he hates himself. The two clandestine lovers aren't appropriate for each other. They have difficulties to accept the other's social behaviour and stance and don't like it to lie to their environments. But soon they cannot live without each other anymore.

The point of the film cannot be to show how two contrary characters complement each other, as Andersson was even more happy with von Sydow before and because it's all told in such a detached manner. The portrait of a love would like to involve the spectators to convey the joy and pain of it. Instead the question why Andersson turns away from von Sydow toward Gould seems intentionally perplexing. The dialogues and acting of the lovers is cerebral and cold, as if they were reciting dazedly on a stage, astounding themselves with their actions and feelings. As if they were actuating on an impulse isolate from their personalities. This impulse or drive is not eros, as especially at the beginning of their affaire sex is more a problem than a fulfilment to these two diffident lovers. Maybe love or the need to feel and give love is itself such a drive, an autonomous thing asserting itself regardless of the circumstances and the characters involved.

The central metaphor of the film is a medieval wooden statue of Mary, recently excavated after being buried for centuries - like Gould's and Andersson's potential to be lovers or man and woman. But with the disinterment of the Mary there also come alive insect larvae inside her, corroding her from within. Before they meet Gould attempted suicide and Andersson was reduced to a wife. They flower in their new love and it destroys their lives.

Civilization means in many ways the domestication of our impulses. Therefore Andersson realizes that she must not harm lastingly her family and Gould's hidden wife/sister. This is true. But Gould is telling her that she is lying to herself by not eloping with him and he's right, too.

This is not a commentary on the film, only a tidbit about the reception in the movie theater of the little town I'm living in. The audience consisted of fifty or a hundred people, most of them students of engineering, as annexed to the town is a small university, a Technische Universität, which means no human sciences. This defines the atmosphere of the town, lots of bright and slightly playful people without much need for intellectual depth. It defines also the selection of movies we get to see in our one and only cosy theater. But once a week a slot in the rooster is reserved for an ‚arty' picture. So the ones feeling a little bit dumbed by the town's lopsidedness shamble now and then to the cinema to see ‚something other' hardly knowing anything about the film apart from that it's this week's special one. After ‚Idioten' was shown I met with the cinema's projectionist who's a friend of mine and he confirmed my impression that the audience's reaction was unique. Never in all the years he's doing this by-job, he told me, has he seen that not one of the spectators did stand up preparing to leave after the movie had finished, instead we all sat there watching benumbed the credits. And in silence, too. Only some unsure exclamations of surprise could be heard, muffled. It was a kind of deeply felt silent applause for this unusually made film and it's even more unusual content.

With this film Mazursky seems to be one of those anthropologists, spearheaded by the French Eric Rohmer, of segments of the late twentieth century supplying cases for hereafter historians. But their work is also of interest for contemporary viewers, evaluating their endeavors to render portraits without superimposing their own systems of values. (What's this tendency with me to express myself in English like a deranged lawyer?) That Rohmer's Paris movies are more watchable than Mazursky's New Yorker kind may be because the latter has to depict a people, the Americans, which behave in contrast to the French rather psychotically. All in all. This is said with cheek in tongue but nevertheless, said it is.