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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS, Page 78CINEMAAugust Sonata
By RICHARD CORLISS
TITLE: The Best Intentions
DIRECTOR: Bille August
WRITER: Ingmar Bergman
THE BOTTOM LINE: Bergman's back and Bille's got him, for
a handsome soap opera with a radiant star performance.
Ingmar Bergman used to say, "I make each film as if it
were my last." The astringent passion he poured into his
metaphysical melodramas -- The Seventh Seal, Persona, Autumn
Sonata and many others -- testifies to that truth. So no one
thought Bergman was kidding when in 1983 he declared that After
the Rehearsal would be his last film. He was 65, a good age for
a parson or a burgher to retire, and he had always been a most
reliably productive artist: in the winter doing his job
directing plays at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater, in the
summer making films as a kind of holiday in hell. Eight years
ago, that routine ended. There was more (luminous) theater work
but no Bergman movie.
The Best Intentions -- written by Bergman but directed by
Bille August, the Dane who made Pelle the Conqueror -- proves
you can't keep a solemn Swede down. It recounts the first
married years of Bergman's parents, whose later lives he
dramatized in his family-album movie, Fanny and Alexander. In
retrospect we can see that Bergman was unlikely to retire to
some Fort Lauderdale of the soul; familiar demons would fill his
afternoon naps with nightmares. And with the unfinished business
of putting his parents on paper. Somebody else would put them
on film.
The result is a decorous, resonant three-hour memory film,
distilled from a six-hour TV mini-series. Henrik Bergman (Samuel
Froler) is a theology student who, it is said, "needs someone
to love, so he won't hate himself so much." Anna (Pernilla
Ostergren) is a bourgeois princess who finds flint beneath her
gentility as she learns to love -- and forces herself to stay
with -- this difficult man as he establishes his ministry in a
small town. She must find comfort in moments of domestic grace:
a chat with her loving father (Max von Sydow), a caress of her
pregnant belly by Henrik, who understands that, inside her,
there is magic greater than his misery.
At times, when Henrik's dour spirit takes control of the
narrative, Intentions threatens to become a mope opera. The film
also lacks the intensity that the Swedish master lent his own
projects; this is Bergman without Bergman. But it is also
Bergman plus August. Like Fanny and Alexander, this film is both
worshipful and critical of its heroes. Like Pelle, it sprawls
on a canvas of long-ago wealth and want, love and anxiety.
"Films begin with the human face," Bergman said, and he
filled his screen with the faces of many great actresses, from
Bibi and Harriet Andersson to Liv Ullmann and Lena Olin. Even
after retiring as a film director, Bergman was still an ace
casting director. This time he insisted that Ostergren, who
played the maid in Fanny and Alexander, be cast as Anna. It is
the film's great coup. She is not exactly beautiful, but her
conviction and radiance carry the story's emotional burden: that
such a woman could love such a man. The strength of her love is
an almost mystical mystery that Bergman dare not explain, or
even understand, but is pleased to present.
August must be doubly pleased that he acceded to Bergman's
request. In May the director was onstage at the Cannes Film
Festival to receive the top prize for Intentions. Standing next
to him was the festival's Best Actress: his bride Pernilla
Ostergren August.