On Screen

...Bergman's overall mastery is accurately reflected in his mastery of detail...

...what is the philosophic content of A Passion...

...Another time his name will be yours, mine, Everyman's...

...yet how horrible is its blood on Andreas' hands...

...Again, during Winkelman's and Anna's last car ride in a downpour, everything around them is in the silver-gray, gunmetal domain: the colors of metallic, cutting truth...

...It is not a harsh, declamatory red, like that of the pool scene in Fellini Satyrieon...

...From the vast number of books in his house, we deduce that he is some kind of litterateur...

...in a similar lonely state of panic Andreas became a forger...

...we do not even find out such basic things as the source of Andreas' income...

...Yet it is indoors that Bergman and Nykvist work their greatest wonders...

...And when Andreas eagerly fumbles with the papers he finds in Anna's bag, the unfurling of that letter with its message of physical and psychic violence is magnified in volume from a mere crinkling to a premonitory, doomful clatter...

...Secondly, that people so utterly lose the sense of their identity that their professions, like everything else about them, become irrelevant, interchangeable...

...Anna comes upon the mangled body of her dead son...

...Antonioni and others...

...And from here the film extends farther, upward and downward...

...Paradoxical but right: There is nothing "Always Romantic" about this fling, a mere humdrum, furtively snatched anodyne...

...and shows him a huge, carefully filed collection of photographs...

...Next morning, Elis takes Andreas to the handsome old mill he has turned into a studio...

...At the very end of the film, when Anna may have intended to drive both of them into death, she nevertheless answers Andreas' last question with words that are full of genuine love and humility...

...The most eloquent device is the use of color and movement together...

...But this is no ordinary pacing: One direction is that of Anna and staying together, the other is that of continued loneliness and exile from experience...

...it is rather the coral glow of healthy cheeks, appetizing rather than strident...

...Anna Fromm comes to use his telephone when hers is out of order, makes a highly emotional plea to someone called Elis with reference to her dead husband and child, is rebuffed in some money matter, and departs distraught...

...We see her scream repeatedly, but the only sound we hear is the ticking of a clock...

...But just as Anna finishes her paean to truth and love, Bergman cuts to a shot we have already seen: the dead Andreas' tortured farewell letter, with the camera moving in extreme close-up across the typescript...

...Even the protection of intimacy we offer one another is not rounded and soft...

...Eva, bored and restless during one of Elis' absences on business, comes to Andreas and has a brief fling with him, all the while protesting her love for her husband whom she cannot meaningfully reach...

...And during all these pleasant preliminaries to sex with Andreas, Eva is telling him of her frustrated love for her husband, Elis...

...First, that things are not as people say they are—because all speakers lie, deceive themselves, or are simply ignorant—and still we sometimes have to believe them, for there is nothing else to go on...

...he politely refuses...

...This is introduced by a quick shot of a light streaming through a sheet of red gelatin: Bergman admits that he is about to use a filmic device, but one that faithfully records the red light of nascent passion turned on in the mind...

...and it is also the movement of the perusing eyes of the second Andreas, who, despite this dark knowledge, will be drawn into an equally gray affair with the woman...

...When Eva comes to visit Andreas, they play a favorite dance record from his student days...

...The main character is Andreas Winkel-man, a man who has relegated his feelings as far inside, and other people as far outside and away from him, as possible...

...Now A Passion does have a central weakness: A good deal of it has to be taken on faith, on somebody's word...

...the unfulfilled wife who resorts to little affairs, dabbling and mendacious...

...Certain island neighbors begin to impinge on his life...

...One example only out of many: When Eva and Andreas have become lovers, there is a close-up of her face, horizontal across the screen, framed from below by Andreas' shoulder and beard, and from above by his bent arm around her...

...So, in Elis' studio, the architect tempts Andreas with a liquor cabinet suddenly flung open...

...Andreas'—anybody's...

...for a while, the whole film goes red...

...Yet the crimes, for Johan was innocent, continue...

...He does, however, come to dinner one day...

...The fact that Andreas' house has no electric light and can nevertheless harbor a functioning tv set is a genuine inconsistency, but a slight one...

...What does get resurrected is that ticking...

...A lateral seesaw movement, then, that unites the two Andreases...

...Andreas goes on a binge, howls his name across the winter landscape, collapses, and is eventually dragged home by Johan Andersson, a lowly firewood-peddler, to whom he has been kind on occasion...

...These, taken by himself as well as clipped from all over, show human beings and faces in every kind of situation, but particularly in emotional crises...

...or when a drunken Andreas bellows out his name into the silent recesses of winter, hoping for some answering voice to confirm his identity, and the obbligato of rusty and guttural foghorns offers only a mixture of mockery and indifference...

...We do not even know how these few data interrelate, if indeed they do...

...We learn from Eva, in an effusion of sympathy, that Andreas and Anna have become lovers, and the rest of the film concerns their unsuccessful affair...

...Finally, the profiles merge in a long kiss and sink out of the image, leaving behind only a window frame dividing the film frame into unequal gray parts...

...Yet this sketchy Andreas is the perfect carrier for the psychic disease he suffers from, and its articulate mouthpiece...

...the sound of the clock (which accompanied some previous scenes with cheerfully hypocritical innocence) emerges ghastlier than any howl...

...On Screen BERGMAN'S MASTER PASSION BY JOHN SIMON Ingmar Bergman's A Passion (released here as The Passion of Anna) records the interplay of four people on the small Swedish island where Bergman lives, the microcosm into which he likes to fit his far-ranging universal visions...

...Or take the scene where Andreas and Eva begin their brief affair...

...People suspect the humble recluse Johan, Andreas' friend, and with vicious, blind cruelty drive the wood-peddler to death...

...The inexorable lateral movement of the camera, in strong contrast to its previous indulgent lingering over a face, is particularly suggestive...

...At the climax of Anna's horrible Easter dream (which in its themes, images, tone and shift to black-and-white photography alludes to the dreams of the heroine of Shame, Bergman's preceding and related film...

...When Winkelman goes to return the letter, Anna is asleep, but her dearest friends, Eva and Elis Vergerus, invite him in...

...Even more impressive are the seemingly natural color tonalities that are nevertheless emotionally slanted...

...Elis himself, in black and white quasi-clerical garb, surrounded by flame-red cardboard boxes, looks like a priest of hell...

...It emerges that the dead Andreas was a potential genius, and that, though they loved each other, he and Anna fought constantly...

...But it is a weakness that reinforces two of the main themes...

...In every indoor sequence a certain color or color combination significantly predominates, without the obtrusiveness of such experiments in recent films by Fellini...

...Andreas the brooder is complemented by Elis the inquirer (his last name, Vergerus, is that of the doctor in The Magician, another ruthless dissector in search of an ultimate truth), but an Elis who has to admit that his photographs provide no answer to the riddle of life...

...The insufficiency of life, the central hollowness beneath the sporadically rich surface...

...The letter is on grayish paper, particularly sobering after the golden glow, and the intense magnification gives the typed characters pathetically frazzled edges...

...Sometimes, however, it is the combination of several colors that is brilliantly provocative...

...The film has been ineptly renamed The Passion of Anna by United Artists...

...Sound is no less important than sight in A Passion—whether it is dialogue, poetic, piercing, cogent...

...But the big surprise of the evening is the somewhat mousy Anna's vehement tirade against cynicism, disbelief and lies, as she holds up her memories of a happy, truth-telling marriage that sustain her through life...

...The morning after Andreas' and Eva's dalliance, things take on a lividly viridescent cast—the hues, as it were, of faint nausea, shame, regret...

...The letter points out that though the couple love each other, they cannot help inflicting reciprocal psychic and physical torture, and must separate...

...That night, having had to sleep over, he is awakened by the screams of Anna, who has had some dreadful nightmare...

...so much for resurrection...

...Through the upper, larger one we dimly perceive a red barn: something like an abstract expressionist painting by Rothko or Gottlieb...

...By slow stages of attrition, they reach the point where each comes close to killing the other and must, finally, part...

...Sven Nyk-vist, the cinematographer, has caught in the outdoor shots a thin, almost constipated color: The austerely wintry woods and blur of a distant sea, the anemic skies with a beclouded sun that looks like a reflector beam rendered impotent by fo'?—these have a way of emerging as faintly tinted lithographs, beautiful but chilling...

...The bird has to be killed...

...or simply sound: church bells, hammering, heavy breathing, the crisply impersonal clink of dishes during a loveless breakfast or, in an ugly, humiliating outdoor fight that follows, the crying of wind and crash of waves from afar...

...These sounds sometimes echo one another...

...All these passions intersect, merge for a moment, feed on and destroy one another...

...It is a passion, also, of suffering, like Christ's passion, only here the collective Calvary of all mankind...

...Now there is a scene in which all these themes coalesce...

...all of us are hangmen and victims, both of others and ourselves, And the death of the bird coincides exactly with the Vietnam executions on tv...

...But that, surely, is not the only parallel intended...

...His wife, Eva, appears to be a charming, easy-going young woman, placidly dependent on her husband, yet Andreas has previously come upon her dozing in her car in broad daylight, because of a fierce insomnia she suffers from at night...

...But the simple Johan became suspect after a lost law case drove him into seclusion, just as Andreas withdrew after his unhappy bout with the law...

...Thus the dinner party is all static close-ups of burnished, warm gold, casting its grace over the solo arias each quartet member delivers in high style...

...it is diamond-hard and cold...

...Although Andreas promises to pose for Elis, he is upset by the architect's cynical bitterness, especially by the casual revelation that Elis' wife had been the dead Andreas' mistress, "quite above board...

...It is time that is the true enemy, the traducer who delivers us to death...

...Coming after an incarnadine sequence, it is all grays and blacks...

...But it is a passion, really: Anna's, Eva's, Elis...

...This was the movement of the typewriter cylinder as the first Andreas wrote the words that were vainly trying to free him from his impossible relationship with Anna...

...And this is an Easter dream...

...It died because of darkness, aloneness, fright...

...Thus in a moment of contentment, like the dinner party, everything is an opulent bronze color, a bronze that happily subsumes the flush of animated faces and the gold of candlelight...

...But this enfolding is not circular: What encloses and partly cuts off Eva's face is a lozenge, a diamond shape...

...Andreas remembers the letter from his namesake...

...Downward there is the devastation in the animal kingdom wreaked by a maniac loose on the island, who goes about slashing sheep to death, hanging puppies, and setting horses on fire...

...Andreas has to kill it with a stone, much like the stones with which the islanders hounded Johan to death...

...Always Romantic"—it is the only time there is music on the soundtrack—and...

...At the same time, the image, already grainy, begins to decompose even further, and, once again, we hear that ominous ticking of the clock...

...As he keeps reversing his way, the camera slowly comes closer, as if to discover some resolution in his face...

...Elis extracts a confession of his crime and imprisonment, but agrees to underwrite a bank loan for him, even engages him to write up his architectural notes, thus obligating and subjugating Andreas all the more...

...Bergman manipulates natural sounds as magisterially as any composer creates his music: when desultory sheep bells become the very voice of melancholy isolation...

...We also gather that his wife, a sculptress, left him...

...And so, in front of a twilight-gray window, two faces in black silhouette play out an amazing ballet of teasing little comings together and drawings apart: The two dark, wavy lines of the profiles dance a pas de deux whose fluctuations are equally beautiful as human lovemaking and as sheer animated abstraction...

...In the handbag she leaves behind, Andreas discovers a farewell letter from her late husband, also called Andreas...

...Andreas goes to Elis' studio to be photographed...

...A bird—it must have been frightened, Andreas says—accidentally collided in the dark with a wall of the house, and is now in agony...

...Over the ticking comes the narrator's voice: "This time his name was Andreas Winkel-man," and the film ends in a white-out...

...Note how brilliantly Bergman turns his chamber quartet into an all-embracing symphony...

...When the camera closes in on Andreas, overexposure makes him only just visible: He collapses in the mud, unable to choose either direction...

...Here he learns that Elis is a famous architect who has been commissioned to build a cultural center in Milan, though he is totally cynical about the project, culture, and life in general...

...Anna, the self-deluding seeker for truth through love, is complemented by Eva...

...Throughout the film, color schemes not only express moods but also contrast pointedly with the colors of what has been or is to come...

...Now Andreas is left alone on the soggy, muddy road, and we see him in a long shot pacing hither and yon...

...He has, we learn at one point, been in prison: He had forged signatures on checks, been drunk, and violently resisted arrest...

...From among the very white walls there gleams out a dazzling array of variously colored liquor bottles, a veritable hoard of the Nibelungs or some other devilish treasure...

...tells him about the car accident in which Anna, who drove, escaped with injuries, while her husband and child were killed...

...And what makes the grayness even chillier is that it follows a sequence with a burning stable, all flaming red...

...What enchants in A Passion is the evocative power of the photography, although this is only Bergman's second color film...

...Andreas and Eva are watching the Saigon chief of police gleefully executing away when a dull thud outside draws them from their tv set...

...Then she drives off, perhaps forever...

...Yes, and the last time his name was Andreas Fromm...

...Upward there is the Vietnam war, which briefly but harrowingly appears on a television set...

...So loneliness makes us suspicious and suspect...