No Limiar da Vida

Undervalued Bergman film whose themes are pregnancy and birth. I've never seen these subjects discussed in a film with such lucidity. Three women in various states of pregnancy are in a hospital room together. We are first introduced to Ingrid Thulin, who is only a few months pregnant. She has come to the hospital because she has had a hemorrhage. She loses the fetus, which gives her a new view on her relationship with her husband (Erland Josephson). One of her roommates, played by Eva Dahlbeck, is nearing the end of her pregnancy. She has a loving relationship with her husband, and they cannot wait to have their child. The third roommate is Bibi Andersson, a young, single woman who has had an abortion before. She doesn't want this baby, either, but neither does she want to have another abortion. Childbirth really is a frightening thing. Even if the woman has a man, she is alone within herself when the event happens. I think this may be one of Bergman's best films, although the poor quality of the video harmed its effect quite a bit. It had white subtitles, and, since the entire film takes place in a hospital, you could imagine that the white hospital gowns and sheets and such really block the subtitles a good amount of the time. There were certainly some major bits of dialogue that I had no chance of understanding. I eagerly await a proper DVD release, although I'm not going to hold my breath. The three actresses are absolutely brilliant, especially Bibi Andersson, who definitely gives one of her best performances.

This film is one of the most important of all those that I have seen in my movie going, spanning fifty years, for it was the first Bergman film I saw in the early sixties at Auckland's only cinema for foreign films. I was struck by its humanity, by its clear eyed view of what it is to be human. Not only did it open up the whole body of Bergman's subsequent work, but I saw the themes first explored in this film deepened and enriched (with a few disappointments to be sure) throughout his career. I first learned here that more difficult and challenging films keep giving long after they have been first seen. Those who say Bergman is gloomy and depressing, all I can say is that the MOST depressing experience in the cinema EVER for me, was being persuaded to join a group of people "just for a laugh" to see the truly execrable "Sex and the City 2" Compare the insulting view of women in that piece of rubbish with this gem.

I saw this film 50 years ago, and already then it impressed me as possibly Ingmar Bergman's best film. It's the closest he ever got to a documentary, and the whole film is shatteringly replenished with intimate close-ups of three mothers at the last stage of the most interesting condition for a woman, two of them giving births, the third being there after a failed abortion. There are other women as well, some nurses and two female visitors but very few men, four altogether, two of them being doctors and two husbands, a failed one and Max von Sydow. The finest acting is presented by Ingrid Thulin, who introduces the film with her passionate and shattering martyrdom and who stays the dominating element of the film although only resignedly from the background; but all these characters are given their own life and space and important part in this every day shattering drama of life, death and birth in totally organic realism.

Seeing it again after 50 years and on the centennial of Ingmar Bergman's birth. it roused an enormous interest in Bergman's other early films from the 50s, which used to be his best, but this is still for me number one.

Without too much variation (hardly any), or adjustment, modification, this incredible presentation would take very little contemporisation - and perhaps that's why its effect today is just as impactful as it must have been upon release, with three stellar female performances built around stories as believable and real, both in isolation and the way they're weaved together, to leave the viewer under no illusion of the heartache and pain they all endure.

Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson are immense as the three ladies in the maternity ward revealing their thoughts and their secrets.

Maybe this isn't the deepest film of Bergman - or the most spectacular film visually - but there is something with this movie that I like. Maybe that's the stripped and easy settings, that's differently in comparison with other films directed by Bergman, or maybe that's the three interesting women's stories - that the film is about - that touches me.

And maybe Bergman knew that. Maybe he knew that films about pregnancies and all that concern about that, touches people. Maybe he knew that it was an excellent idea to directing a film, that takes place in some gloomy hospital wards - for the gloomy settings, leaves space to a film that entirely focus on three - more or less - wounded souls.

Maybe he knew that. Maybe he knew that it was the way to a masterpiece.