Brink of Life (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)

Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson in Brink of Life

Cast: Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, Erland Josephson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Sjöberg, Ann-Marie Gyllenspetz, Inga Landgré. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, Ulla Isaaksson, based on novels by Isaksson. Cinematography: Max Wilén. Production design: Bibi Lindström. Film editing: Carl-Olov Skeppstedt. 

For all the frankness of its subject matter, Ingmar Bergman's Brink of Life is as formulaic as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s. Three women are sharing a room in the obstetrics ward of a hospital. One of them, Cecilia (Ingrid Thulin), has miscarried and is being treated for bleeding. Another, Stina (Eva Dahlbeck), is in almost the opposite condition: She has gone well past term in her pregnancy and is there hoping that labor will be induced if it doesn't occur right away. The third, Hjördis (Bibi Andersson), is only in her third month, but she has experienced some bleeding -- perhaps, we learn, because she's unwed and doesn't want the baby, so she's been trying to cause a spontaneous abortion. Cecilia is in the throes of depression, blaming herself for the miscarriage because neither she nor her cold, priggish husband, Anders (Erland Josephson), was entirely certain that they wanted a child. Again, Stina is the precise opposite: She's rapturous about having a baby, and so is her husband, Harry (Max von Sydow). Between these polarities, Hjördis is fighting with the social worker who is trying to advise her on how she can live after the baby arrives. The best advice is, of course, to go home to her parents, but since she left precisely because she doesn't get along with her mother, she strongly rejects the idea of facing the disapproval she expects to encounter from her. It's all a setup for the kind of plot resolutions you might expect: Cecilia grows stronger and chooses to face up to her disintegrating marriage and a childless future. Stina loses the baby in a prolonged and difficult labor. And Hjördis discovers that maybe her mother isn't so bad after all. There's a feeling of anticlimax about these eventualities. That the film works at all is the product of the performances of the three actresses, along with Bergman's steadily unsentimental direction, which makes the predictability of the story more tolerable than it might be in a Hollywood tearjerker. Still, I can't help feeling that the stories of what happens to Cecilia, Stina, and Hjördis after the film ends would make a more interesting movie.   

The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960)

The Virgin Spring was probably the first Bergman film I ever saw, and it made a powerful impression that stuck with me for 50-some years. I think that's one reason why I have mixed feelings about it today. In outline, it's a simple tale based on a 13th-century Swedish ballad, in which a young girl on her way to church is raped and murdered, but from the ground where the crime took place, a spring of fresh water erupts miraculously. But watching it today I see a more complex story, full of moral ambiguities. The girl, Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), is not such a paragon as I remembered: She is spoiled and prideful, trying to sleep late and avoid the task of taking the candles to the church. She may not even be as innocent as she is thought to be: The servant, Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), who accompanies her says the reason she wants to sleep late is that she was out the previous night flirting with a boy. Karin's mother, Märeta (Birgitta Valberg), is on the one hand a religious fanatic given to self-torture, and on the other an indulgent parent unwilling to discipline her daughter. Karin's father, Töre (Max von Sydow), is divided between the Christian faith he has adopted and a furious desire to wreak revenge on the rapist-murderers. After he has killed the two men and the boy who accompanied them, he expresses remorse but also blames God for his daughter's fate. He vows to build a church on the site, and the spring gushes forth, but as a miracle it seems like a somewhat anticlimactic response to the horror that has gone before. (It's not like the site, where running water is copious, even needs another spring.) Bergman for once is working from a screenplay he didn't write: It's by Ulla Isaksson, which may be why the film is poised so ambiguously between Christian affirmation and Bergman's usual bleak alienation. It is, however, one of Bergman's most beautifully accomplished films, joining him with the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, with whom he had worked only once before (seven years earlier on Sawdust and Tinsel), and with whom he would form one of the great working partnerships in film history. In its evocation of medieval narrative and meticulous re-creation of a milieu (the production designer is P.A. Lundgren), it's superb. But as a film from one of the great modern directors it seems oddly anachronistic and insincere.