|
"The most difficult of virtues" (Eliot on Baudelaire) is a pedant's lesson in humility, a long summer day compresses the dual journey of remembrances and reveries. The academic grouch (Victor Sjöström) has nearly eighty years of rigidity and regret, so it goes with Ingmar Bergman's Scrooge on his way to an honorary degree, "they should have made me honorary idiot." The proximity of death is a clock without hands, the blanched nightmare cites The Phantom Carriage and Vampyr and leaves Lynch with a crucial image (a grimacing balloon that bleeds). Into a boxy car for the professor and his daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin), the road from Stockholm to Lund has plenty of pit stops for flashes from the past to illuminate the present. The verdant patch of memory in the childhood cottage, its berries and weeds, the beloved cousin (Bibi Andersson) reincarnated as a jaunty hitchhiker juggling a pair of beaus. Wedged between youth and dotage is middle-age—a crash acquaints the travelers with a married couple (Gunnar Sjöberg, Gunnel Broström) locked in toxic bondage ("My wife likes ridiculing me. I let her, it's psychotherapy"), an acrid sketch that burns a hole in the Chekhovian flow. The ancient mother with the discarded doll (Naima Wifstrand), the son (Gunnar Björnstrand) following in the doctor's crabby footsteps, the pregnant chill in the pit of Thulin's stomach. "In this jumble of events, I seemed to discern an extraordinary clarity." The rancor of old age is its own purgatory, geriatric thawing is a crisscrossing spectacle, a constellation dilated by Resnais (Providence). Scolded in pitiless dreams and lauded in gassy ceremonies, the curmudgeon has the reward of a smiling flirtation and a peaceful night's sleep. "A nice and relaxing drive, wasn't it?" Sjöström's sublimely creased visage in serene close-up is the concluding oasis, Bergman contemplates the miracle in awe and envy. Cinematography by Gunnar Fischer. With Jullan Kindahl, Folke Sundquist, Björn Bjelfvenstam, Gertrud Fridh, and Max von Sydow. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |