Coming on the heels of his Trilogy, this Ingmar Bergman comedy could be seen as personal relaxation tossed off between exhausting emotional confession. Unhappily, the relentless atmosphere of forced merriment (hammy musical cues, silent-style mugging into the lenses, some clueless slapstick with marble busts and fireworks) suggests tormented Ingmar willfully laboring himself into a state of mirth ("I am gonna be lighthearted if it kills me, godamnit!"). It isn't so much that the filmmaker can't do comedy -- contrary to his aesthete image, humor runs through most of his work, and one of his undervalued works, A Lesson in Love, is an outright comedy. The trouble is that Bergman always uses cinema as direct pipeline into his own emotional states, and here he simply can't muster the kind of relaxed, playful mood that would keep the brittle comedy from curdling. (The film lies uneasily between The Silence and Persona, two of his most unrelenting exercises in anguish.) The romping gets rather more interesting (if no less unfunny) once the candy-colored skittering poured over the narrative -- effete music critic Jarl Kulle comes to write a famous cellist's biography and gets involved with the brigades of women in his subject's life -- reveals the director's notions about his art (and how it is perceived). The self-reflexivity is further pushed via the conscious casting of such formidable specimens as Bibi Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck and Harriet Andersson, among other staples of Bergman's own artistic harem. Bergman wrote the screenplay with Erland Josephson. With Allan Edwall, Karin Kavli, Gertrud Fridh, Mona Malm, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, and Georg Funkquist.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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