The Passion of Anna
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Movie Reviews of The Passion of Anna
Movie Review: The Passions of Ingmar
Summary: 4 Stars
There's a lot going on in this movie, maybe too much. Andreas (Max Von Sydow), running away from some obscure disgrace, has come to live in a mildly dilapidated farmhouse on a small island. Bergman is working in color in this movie, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist is up to the challenge. He paints with an end of winter palette, the browns of wet, muddy ground, the gray of soupy overcast, the weak blue of late winter skies, the grey/white of dirty snow. Andreas moves through this bleak landscape with a look of stolid suffering on his face.
His solitude is broken by a woman who comes to his door and asks to use the phone. This woman, Anna, (Liv Ullman) makes her call and leaves, but forgets her purse. Curious, Andreas peeks into the purse and reads a letter from a man, obviously a lover, saying that he can't continue their relationship. Andreas returns the purse to the house where Anna is staying and gets invited in to dinner with Anna and the couple who live there, Eva and Elis (Bergman regulars Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson). We learn that Anna's been in a bad car accident, one in which her husband and son were killed.
In an unusual move for him, Bergman films the dinner scene as pure improvisation, allowing each of the actors a few glasses of wine and a few minutes of dinner table philosophizing. He also pulls us out of the film on four separate occasions to have each of the four main actors analyze the characters they're playing. Since he typically kept tight control of the lines his actors spoke, this openness suggests that Bergman is asking the cast to help him find the heart of this movie.
Andreas has a brief affair with Eva, but both of them seem to realize there's no center to it. Then, abruptly, we learn that Andreas and Anna have moved in together. Anna's passion is for honesty. She doesn't want anything to do with evasion or deception. But in Andreas she's tied in to a man with a hazy past and no real desire to lay his emotional cards on the table. After they've lived together relatively peaceably, Anna reveals that it was she who was driving the day her husband and son were killed. A little while later, Andreas tells her his soul is dead and he can't find the will or the reason to go on with her.
There's a subplot about an unknown psychopath loose on the island who murders and mutilates animals. We're never quite sure what this senseless slaughter means, other than to highlight the many ways in which those who are living wage war on life. In his soul-baring speech, Andreas compares humans to animals, sentient but silent about the suffering they endure.
By the movie's end, Andreas discovers that Anna's passion for honesty is a way of masking her madness, and that he is potentially her victim as well as her lover. The final shot is unforgettable. Anna has driven off, and Andreas, alone, paces back and forth on the road like a caged animal. His cage isn't physical; it's the consciousness of his condition that he can't escape. As he sinks to the muddy ground, the camera slowly zooms in, losing focus as it does so, until the image dissolves into grainy incoherence. Another of Bergman's existential antiheroes bites the dust, disintegrating before our eyes.
Many of Bergman's major preoccupations are on display in this film: the splintering of personality under stress; the emptiness of a world from which God has withdrawn; the inability of men and women to rescue one another from their self-created prisons; the porous boundaries between art and life. But the tight dramatic structure of his other major films from this period is missing here. The story has a resolution of sorts, but the bigger questions about the characters - how Anna got trapped in her peculiar mania, how Andreas got lost in a fog of emotional emptiness - stay unanswered. Eva and Elis have major roles in the first part of the film, and then disappear halfway through the story. And who killed all those sheep, cows and horses anyway, and why?
You're carried along moment to moment by the fine acting and often startling imagery. It's only when the film stops rolling and the lights come up that you wake and wonder whether Bergman himself understood what story he wants to tell. When held to the highest standard of world cinema - his own work - The Passion of Anna ranks as good but not transcendent Bergman.
Movie Review: Bergman in top form
Summary: 4 Stars
Ingmar Bergman's 1969 film A Passion (En Passion, misnomered in America as The Passion Of Anna) is a great film, and out of the series of late 1960s films (also including Persona, Hour Of The Wolf, and Shame) dealing with relationships and the self, it may be the best. It stars many of the Bergman retinue of actors: Max Von Sydow as Andreas Winkelman, Liv Ullman as Anna Fromm, Bibi Andersson as Eva Vergerus, and Erland Josephson as Elis Vergerus.
It follows Andreas, an ex-convict, as he recovers from his wife's abandonment, on a small farm on a Swedish island- ostensibly Bergman's own Farö, where it was filmed. One day, Anna, a crippled widow, comes to his home and Andreas listens in on the phone call she needs to make. She then accidentally (or not?) leaves her purse at his house, and he reads a letter of her rocky marriage, as he digs through her purse to find her address, and learns of her dead husband's fears for her sanity. When he returns the purse, that night, he meets the Vergeruses, the couple whom Anna lives with. He is later invited over to dinner, and the foursome discuss life and philosophy.....Throughout the film, a number of other subtexts emerge, such as Bergman again breaking the fictive spell of the film by having his four main actors portray themselves talking about their characters. Another side story involves the abuse, torture, and killing of local animals. A local hermit, with a history of mental instability, is suspected. Andreas knows the man, Johan Andersson (Erik Hell), and it's clear he is not the culprit, because he is an old lumbering man, and early in the film the audience glimpsed a young man speedily running away from a scene where he is hanging the puppy that Andreas saves. Nonetheless, as sheep, and other animals, are killed, a band of young vigilante islanders have apparently beaten and tortured the old man to confess. This act of cruelty drives him to suicide, and he leaves a note of thanks for Andreas, for all his kindnesses, that the police bring to him....
This film's ending is famous, but has been misinterpreted in many ways. First, Bergman has admitted in print that he did not zoom in to get the graininess of the final images, but merely blew up the shot. As for what it means? Many take it simply as the psychological dissolution of Andreas Winkeleman, which is the final in a series of character dissolutions in this series of late 1960s films....But that's too melodramatic a claim....The ending leaves a visceral impact, both for its visuals and its often overlooked critical revelation....The film succeeds magnificently, in an understated way that many of Bergman's more famous films do not. It's that good.
Movie Review: A strong effort of the late 1960s
Summary: 4 Stars
The protagonist of Ingmar Bergman's 1969 drama EN PASION (The Passion of Anna) is Andreas Winkelman (Max von Sydow), a fortyish year-old man who has isolated himself on an island after some rough years. There he meets Anna (Liv Ullman), who herself has a mysterious past in which her husband and son perished in an automobile accident. The troubled relationship that builds between the two, and the interference of slightly threatening neighbours Elis (Erland Josephson) and Eva (Bibi Andersson), form the bulk of the plot. There's also an enigmatic subplot in which the islands livestock are killed by some deranged figure.
The film contains some innovations of Bergman, beyond the fact that it was his first colour film. The first evident is the presence of a narrator, whose contributions are few but which remind us that we are watching a document of some earlier event, not spying in on scenes as they happen. Also, pauses in the film's action come four times in the film, as we see the actors being interviewed about the characters they play, reminding us that this is very much a fictional account to which the actors must apply their skills. Finally, the film shows the start of Bergman's interest in improvised dialogue, as a dinner party scene allowed the actors to say whatever came to mind.
I liked the film quite a bit. Especially positive aspects include Erland Josephson again playing a creepy role (like the Baron in VARGTIMMEN), the rapport between Sydow and Ullman (more convincing than in VARGTIMMEN), and the strong cinematography. At one point in the film, Anna relates a dream, the flashback of which is a scene taken from Bergman's earlier film SKAMEN, a fascinating establishment of thematic continuity. And the closing shot, which I won't mention here to avoid spoiling the ending, is extremely clever and thought-provoking.
However, a couple of things stopped me from liking this as much as some other Bergman films. Andreas' scolding of Anna at one point in the film seems too much like a repeat of Tomas' diatribe against Marta in NATTVARDSGAESTERNA. Also, the dropping of Eva's role, as well as the failure to provide sufficient closure on the killing of livestock, make this film end too abruptly. It's a strong effort, but not Bergman's best.
If you don't know the work of Ingmar Bergman, I'd suggest working through his films chronologically starting from DET SJUNDE INSEGLET (The Seventh Seal). EN PASION will be one memorable installment along the way.
Movie Review: A film whose ending is self-referential
Summary: 4 Stars
"The Passion of Anna"--or simply "Passion" in the Swedish--ends with the protagonist Andreas (Max von Sydow) striding back and forth in increasingly unraveling indecision until he finally collapses. Although it pains me to say it--and although I'm the in the minority among Bergman fans when it comes to "Passion"--I think this is a good metaphor for the film's quality.
Bergman said that he thought of "Passion" as a catalogue of moods, or passions/sufferings. Andreas is the loner, broken by life, who manages to achieve some semblance of peace by retreating from all responsibility to others. Anna Fromm (Liv Ullmann), a widow who has lost her family in a horrible car accident, encloses herself within her memories, and is just as shut-down as Andreas (although she seems almost redeemable at the movie's end). Eva (Bibi Andersson) is a childless wife who feels radically incomplete, and her husband Elis is an affectless and manipulative guy who endlessly photographs people and renders them one-dimensional and powerless. But the lives of the four people never quite mesh into a single film. In fact, Eva and Elis disappear altogether in the second half.
In the accompanying interviews with Ullmann and Erlander Josephson (who plays Elis), both actors think that Bergman wasn't quite sure what he wanted to do with this film. "Passion" is famous for the story getting interrupted several times for cameo interviews with the four principle actors as they explain how they envision their characters. Ullmann says that this wasn't planned by Bergman, but instead was a spontaneous decision on the set. Josephson, who's always been remarkably loyal to Bergman, thinks it was an artistic mistake.
Bergman was always a director who insisted on order, coherency, and blueprints. The very fact that he made spur of the moment decisions while filming "Passion" suggests that he wasn't quite sure in his own mind what he wanted the film to be. And even though the film is well worth seeing--because even an unsuccessful Bergman movie is still a cut above most others--it's not his best.
Three and a half stars.
Movie Review: Yet anoyher flaw with the bergman collection???
Summary: 3 Stars
The movie itself is fascinating but the transfer is so-so. I don't know if it's a problem with my copy but the image is not centered (I had to rotate the image).
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