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| Bibi Andersson and Elliott Gould in The Touch |
I didn't believe a minute of The Touch, and not just because Elliott Gould was so terribly miscast as the male lead in a romantic drama. The film struck me as formulaic in so many predictable ways, particularly the heavy-handed contrast of the milieu from which Karin Vergerus (Bibi Andersson) comes -- pristine, middle-class, Nordic -- and the one from which her lover, David Kovac (Gould), comes -- sloppy, intellectual, Jewish. There's also a thudding use of symbols, like the long-immured statue of the Virgin and Child that's infested with a species of beetles that has lain dormant until David, an archaeologist, uncovers it. It's a film with nothing new to tell us, or at least nothing that Ingmar Bergman hasn't told us in better films about troubled marriages and destructive love affairs. It was heavily panned on release and a box office failure, but it has since been revived by admirers who find it carefully crafted and subtly unsettling. I admire the craft, including Sven Nykvist's always evocative photography and Andersson's dedicated performance, but it still seems to me a flawed and obvious story.
