I watched it over the weekend, and it reinforced my previous impression that Bergman's script is the film's weakest point. The characters are scarcely stick figures - clumsy mouthpieces for Bergman's callow pensées, acting in an extremely illogical manner simply for the convenience of the conception (why doesn't Jan-Erik actually tell anybody what he knows, instead of just having a single, inarticulate outburst? why does Bertha's fate have to be so glibly convenient that it makes your teeth ache?)blindside8zao wrote:I watched Torment last night and it was very entertaining. It's very over the top in many of its stylizations just the way a movie about the teenage years should be. The stylization would also make sense if one considers the film a nazi allegory. My favorite part of the film was definetly the German Expressionist type view of the staircase we get repeatedly, with the shadow scene around the middle really taking this to its extreme.
Sjoberg was a terrific director, and it's a shame that his work is represented on DVD only by this film. The best moments of the film are the unscripted ones - the atmosphere he creates around the school (as blindside notes), the unfussy camera movements and their counterpoint with the movements of people within the frame. Here's hoping we don't have to wait too long for the magnificent Miss Julie.
And here's hoping some company somewhere does the right thing by the amazing-sounding Karin Mansdotter and Only a Mother. I've wanted to see those films ever since I read about them in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary years ago. Karin sounds visually stunning, and Eva Dahlbeck in the latter is described as giving one of the greatest screen performances ever. Given the quality of Bjork and Palme's work in Miss Julie, that's something I just have to see. Here's an old NYT review of the two films:
Janet Maslin, NYT 3/10/81 wrote:The New York Film Festival's double bill of films by Alf Sjoberg makes a fine retrospective program, illuminating the talents of a Swedish director whose simple, heartfelt, visually breathtaking style at times has a resonance like John Ford's. ''Only a Mother'' (1948) and ''Karin Mandsdotter'' (1954) present the late Mr. Sjoberg as a largely overlooked figure whose films have their moments of astonishing beauty.
''Only A Mother'' features Eva Dahlbeck, an actress so radiant that she often gives the false impression of being a blonde; that's how much she seems to glow. Miss Dahlbeck plays the heroine in a saga based on a novel by Ivar Lo-Johansson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mr. Sjoberg. Miss Dahlbeck's Rya-Rya is first seen bathing unclothed in the farm country where she works, in a gesture that will establish her as both an unwitting sensualist in the audience's eyes and a woman of questionable morals in the eyes of her fellow peasants. This leads the way to a winding, very heavily plotted story of misplaced passions and tragic decline.
Rya-Rya truly loves Nils, who is played by a young and rail-thin Max von Sydow. But Nils is offended by the bathing, which he takes to be lascivious behavior, even though Miss Dahlbeck enacts it with an innocence few modern actresses could match. So Rya-Rya is forced into the arms of the wrong man, in a turbulent nighttime sequence Mr. Sjoberg presents with whirling camera movements over a shadowy landscape. Though Nils is lost to the heroine after this, he reappears as a passionate figure in the film, at one point hoisting her onto his wagon and carrying her across the countryside at a full gallop. Mr. Sjoberg makes particularly good use of motion; the scenes with Nils are as breathless as those between Rya-Rya and her husband are still.
In a story devoted in equal parts to romance and to detailing the hardships of a peasant life, Miss Dahlbeck projects such heroism and substance that she overpowers the movie's aspect of melodrama. She shines so purely and suffers with such dignity that ''Only A Mother'' can build up to the sort of weepy, old-fashioned ending that modern films no longer dare attempt.
And ''Karin Mandsdotter,'' which was photographed in black and white by Sven Nykvist, is even more visually stunning. If ''Only a Mother'' is the more solid and conventional of these two films, ''Karin Mansdotter'' is the more experimental. A narrative about the title character, a mistress of King Erik IV who became his Queen and shared his downfall, is presented in swift synopsis, then in excerpts from Strindberg's play ''Erik IV,'' and finally in a moody epilogue.
Ulla Jacobsson's performance in the title role is not on a par with Miss Dahlbeck's, but the interpretations of the characters are similar enough to make the nature of Mr. Sjoberg's directorial approach to his actresses very evident. Like Rya-Rya, Karin is a fresh, naive, essentially good beauty whose downfall measures the weakness of those around her. "
