Crisi

I guess it is forgivable for a first film to be maudlin, with cardboard characters and silly dialogue. This is the story of a young woman who decides to get out of town because there is no future there. She lives with her dying stepmother, her real mother leaving her behind for 18 years. She just kind of flits through things because she has pretty much been adored. She is impetuous. I haven't seen such a tear jerking woman as her loving stepmother, maybe Mrs. March in little women. She goes to be a hair stylist and gets hooked up with some bad ones, including a wolfish playboy. Meanwhile some big lunk with a silly name, Ulfe, carries a torch for her. In fairness, it has lots of very good shots and is pretty polished for a first film. It's just a bit dull and silly and very predictable.

The narrator at the beginning of this film mentions it's a comedy, and while the film which follows is hardly that, maybe he's referring to the laughable choices we sometimes make in life when young, because that's what this crisis seems to be about. It's either that or the crisis Bergman himself was facing as a struggling first-time director. Anyway, in the film, a young woman has been raised to the age of 18 in a small town by her adoptive mother, and is being courted by her mother's lodger, who while annoying, boring, and older, at least seems like a decent guy who cares for her. Enter her birth mother, who wants to take her to Stockholm to work in her beauty salon, as well as her birth mom's younger boyfriend, who is a creepy and disturbing lothario. The choice is thus between town/adoptive mom/nice guy, vs. city/birth mom/ladies man, and the film sets it pretty much up in those black and white terms.

One exception to that is how the film shows selfish vs. selfless love, and we find that most of it (or maybe all of it?) is at least partially the former, which was interesting. I also appreciated how the film confronts adoptive vs. birth parent rights, with the adoptive mom asserting herself, though that doesn't really develop much from there, since the young woman is old enough to make her own decisions.

Most of the scenes felt pretty generic and not all that compelling, but there were some exceptions. I loved the scene at the ball when the youth rearrange the furniture in the next room, then improvise some modern music and dance wildly, to the consternation of the older folks trying to listen to an opera singer. There is also a lovely scene when the adoptive mom is lying sleepless on a train, and remembering moments from the past. Bergman also gets a little zinger in on men when a woman in the beauty parlor quotes Catherine the Great as saying once you've had 10,000 men, you find that there isn't a whole lot of difference between any of them.

Unfortunately, despite solid performances from the cast, the film suffers mainly because of its script, which is melodramatic and simplistic. The craziest thing was the signature move we find that the playboy puts on women. He tells them he's killed his girlfriend, wants to turn himself into the police, and may shoot himself ... and apparently this is an approach that gets them into bed. (What?) The film also suffers from a lack of clarity and a wandering in tone, complete with an oddly jaunty soundtrack in places, and the young director is to blame for this. He himself commented in 1973 that "If someone had asked me to film the phone book, then I would have done it. The result might have been slightly better. I knew nothing, couldn't do anything, and felt like a crazy cat in a yarn harness," and the result was the studio sending in Victor Sjöström to help supervise him through the chaos. As Bergman idolized the man, that must have been very tough for him. Despite all of this, the film is not awful or anything, but it is decidedly average, and for Bergman completists only.

Bergman's adaptation of Leck Fischer's play behaves like a stage play that has been slightly adapted for the screen. It is essentially a chamber melodrama and it makes little use of the cinema's expanded scope. The film is watchable and the cast is competent. Almost everything about it is competent. It was Bergman's first go at directing a film. He was 27/28 years old at the time.

Bergman is clearly influenced by Ibsen - I say "is", because the old master (nearly 85 years old now) is still at it on the stage - I have the privilege to hold tickets to see his adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts in London May 2003 - can't wait. Kris is clearly influenced by Ibsen, but while the piece has borrowed Ibsen's mastery of structure and development, Kris lacks depth. If Ibsen is grand opera, Kris is operetta. Bergman had not yet acquired the skill to turn a minor play into a major film.

There is the odd hint of greatness to come, in particular the railway scene between Jack and Ingeborg. There is also the odd interesting camera angle. But some of the cutting is amateurish and the music is ghastly.

If the weatherman tells you that there is going to be a tremendous storm, you do not need to be a genius to recognise that the wispy breeze is a prelude to that storm. In the absence of that weather forecast, you could be forgiven for not recognising the breeze as an early hint at the big one. So it is with this film. Because we know it is Bergman, we see hints of greatness to come. Otherwise this would seem like an (admittedly above average) ordinary 1940's film.

Bergman aficionados will enjoy it, but it should be quite a way down the list for people who want to start discovering the greatness of Bergman's work.

Ingeborg (Dagny Lind) is a small-town piano teacher who raises her foster daughter, Nelly (Inga Landgré), into young adulthood. When Nelly is eighteen, she is shocked by the arrival of Jenny, her mother, whom she calls "Auntie." Jenny wants to take her to the big city and teach her to be a beautician in her salon. This is devastating news for Ingeborg, who is ill and does not expect to live long. Ulf, the stolid 30ish man in love with Nelly, begs her to stay; but she is not in love with him, considering him much too old. Instead, she is attracted to Jack, a new arrival in town. She doesn't guess that this strange young man with the striped suit and dashing mustache is her mother's lover as well.

Ingmar Bergman, making his directorial debut working with his own script adapted from a play by Leck Fischer, presents a lovely story that begins light and grows darker. Although he gets some beautifully composed shots from his cinematographer, Gösta Roosling, the movie is not put together in a particularly exciting or interesting way. His most impressive work is with his actors, who bring out all the shades of their multifaceted characters.

Those Shakespearean characterizations are what strike me the most. I don't know if they come from Fischer or Bergman. We see Jack (Stig Olin) as a dangerous lover, mischievous young man, laughable weakling, brooding intellectual and manipulative seducer. Jenny (Marianne Löfgren) appears as a selfish intruder, silly airhead, vain older woman and compassionate mother. 400 years after Shakespeare and over 60 years after this movie, we still don't often see characters like these.

For a directional debut, this is very solid stuff, not only skillfully directed but also set to a brilliant original music score. I would however identify one weakness with Bergman's directing here: it is very much tailored to the script, with dialogue or narration almost all the time, and this leads to it being too talkative, with limited breaks in which one can stop and admire the way that the story is being told. The film is in this sense very different to the style that Bergman would later adopt, and although perhaps somewhat weak, Bergman's skills do shine through. There are well-framed shots, an effective stream-of-consciousness sequence, great camera angles and excellent camera movement. The inclusion of some more non-dialogue bits possibly would have improved this film, but there is little else to complain about, with quite a good story behind the material too.