Ingmar Bergman's televised theater, part II
If you know Ingmar Bergman primarily as a director of motion pictures - and since you are reading this review in English rather than Swedish, that is almost certainly the case - you probably know him as the miserabilist creator of morbid, heavy character dramas, one after the other, fixated on dying marriages, death, and reckoning with the absence of God. Plus that one bittersweet sex comedy he made in the '50s. If you know him primarily as a director of stage plays, however... actually, I don't know. I don't know him from his stage work. And I doubt that a director so intimately associated with Strindberg would have developed a reputation for sunshine and buttercups, in any medium.
But I do know that, in addition to Strindberg, one of Bergman's great loves was Molière, and that he was much more prone to staging farces than you'd ever guess from his filmography. And during his short dalliance with directing plays for television in the late 1950s, he filmed one such play, a late-Renaissance sex comedy titled La veniexiana ("The Venetian Women") I know absolutely nothing about this play that a short internet search couldn't tell me: it was, apparently, a dialect-driven comedy in five acts, mostly written in the very idiosyncratic Venetian language, as well as Tuscan; it was anonymous; and it was lost to history until the early 20th Century. Bergman's film (retitled Ventianskan, Swedish for "The Venetian" - a meaningless title in context) is of course no longer an Italian dialect comedy, and at 56 minutes long, I assume it is a great deal compressed from the five-act original (though it preserves a five-part structure). It played on television in the winter of 1958, a couple of months after the wistfully glum old-age meditation Wild Strawberries premiered in theaters, and only weeks ahead of the pointedly boundary-pushing issues drama Brink of Life, and it distinctly feels like something that you make when you are up to your neck in grave stories of heavy emotion and major consequences, and just need something playful.
For one thing, it's brutally simple. Bergman's earlier television play, 1957's Mr. Sleeman Is Coming, put some real effort into building the production around the camera and its affordances: it is a play heavily reliant on the ability to move close to an actor's face and isolate characters in singles. The Venetian spends almost its entire first half treating the camera like a first-row seat in front of a proscenium stage: long passages of action go by without cutting, even as characters exit and enter, and the shot scale never gets closer than a fairly loose medium shot. This eventually changes; not only does the image cut right in the middle of a conversation to give us different angles on the speakers, there are multiple points where actors are obscured by other stage elements in a manner that feels solely about creating an interesting composition.
Mostly, though, this feels very much like we're watching canned theater. This isn't mere laziness; it does seem, especially in the particularly stripped-down and unfussy first act, like this is a deliberate choice trying to situate us relative to the action in a very certain way. The Venetian is a very presentational, artificial play, presented by three men in elaborate masquerade-like costumes, singing about the foolishness of love and all that; one of them, garishly dressed and with a terrifically long nose on his mask (Sture Lagerwall, who also has a role in the narrative; I'm not quite certain if he's meant to be the same figure in both roles), lets us know that we're about to watch a little fable about women making fools of themselves over a handsome man. It's very arch and detached, and it would feel just as arch onstage as in front of a camera, I suspect, and this seems to me to be the point. The Venetian is pretty archaic, subscribing to theatrical formulae that were centuries out of date; presenting the whole thing as a kind of ritualised, stagebound, deeply unrealistic pageant seems to me to be Bergman's way of celebrating that fact rather than attempting to hide it.
The plot of the thing is that a Milanese man, Julio (Folke Sundquist), has come to Venice for the carnival, and in so doing caught the eye of Angela (Eva Stiberg), a rich widow, and Valeria (Gunnel Lindblom), a bored married woman. They scheme for his attention, aided by their respective maids, Nena (Maud Hansson) and Oria (Helena Reuterblad). That's pretty much it; the bulk of the story (I presume there is more to it in the original) takes place in rooms where a pair of characters discuss the situation as it currently arrives, with a tone that feels less laugh-out-loud funny than cleverly dirty, to my mind. I'm watching this, mind you, filtered twice over: once through translation into Swedish, then again through English subtitles. It would be impressive indeed if any belly laughs could survive that. I do think that Bergman and the cast are trying to make it funny, if only because Hansson spends pretty much her entire role pulling faces and opening her eyes very wide.
At any rate, the simplicity of the story and the simplicity of the production feel of a piece, and while it's cute, it's not really very interesting or exciting. The banal sexist tone of the narrative, rather surprising for a director as invested in creating imposing roles for his actresses as Bergman, is somewhat offset by how good the four women in the cast are. Lindblom is the standout, pretty obviously (she was the only member of the cast to have multiple major roles in Bergman's features, though Lagerwall would later have a significant part in The Devil's Eye, a mostly-forgotten feature from 1960, and Hansson and Sundquist had small parts in a couple of Bergman films each), underplaying the comedy to get at the smug upper-class ennui of her character, but all four of the women find at least something to do here, and not even the same thing. Lagerwall also does well enough with a part that's so broad and artificial that I can't really imagine what better than "well enough" would even look like; he moves with graceful broadness, he insinuates himself with the camera, and he does a funny voice.
On the opposite side of the scale, I find Sundquist a bit of a bore; the character is a bit of a bore, but he's underlining that rather than trying to make something interesting of it. The play doesn't endorse Julio's smug self-satisfaction, but it doesn't really puncture it either, and so the part (at least in this rendering of the script) basically feels like a functional object designed to get us into the scenario. Neither Bergman nor Sundquist does much of anything with that; Julio is the rock around which the narrative breaks, and he has all the charisma and personality of a rock, too.
In short, this is pretty much a tossed-off palate cleanser, and as the first of no fewer than four filmed projects Bergman released in 1958, there's no reason to expect more of it. It's pleasant little stretching exercise, obviously designed to be fast and painless to make, as well as fast and painless to watch. Very much something for completists only but by 1958, the Bergman completist has slogged through much tougher stuff than this little bauble.
But I do know that, in addition to Strindberg, one of Bergman's great loves was Molière, and that he was much more prone to staging farces than you'd ever guess from his filmography. And during his short dalliance with directing plays for television in the late 1950s, he filmed one such play, a late-Renaissance sex comedy titled La veniexiana ("The Venetian Women") I know absolutely nothing about this play that a short internet search couldn't tell me: it was, apparently, a dialect-driven comedy in five acts, mostly written in the very idiosyncratic Venetian language, as well as Tuscan; it was anonymous; and it was lost to history until the early 20th Century. Bergman's film (retitled Ventianskan, Swedish for "The Venetian" - a meaningless title in context) is of course no longer an Italian dialect comedy, and at 56 minutes long, I assume it is a great deal compressed from the five-act original (though it preserves a five-part structure). It played on television in the winter of 1958, a couple of months after the wistfully glum old-age meditation Wild Strawberries premiered in theaters, and only weeks ahead of the pointedly boundary-pushing issues drama Brink of Life, and it distinctly feels like something that you make when you are up to your neck in grave stories of heavy emotion and major consequences, and just need something playful.
For one thing, it's brutally simple. Bergman's earlier television play, 1957's Mr. Sleeman Is Coming, put some real effort into building the production around the camera and its affordances: it is a play heavily reliant on the ability to move close to an actor's face and isolate characters in singles. The Venetian spends almost its entire first half treating the camera like a first-row seat in front of a proscenium stage: long passages of action go by without cutting, even as characters exit and enter, and the shot scale never gets closer than a fairly loose medium shot. This eventually changes; not only does the image cut right in the middle of a conversation to give us different angles on the speakers, there are multiple points where actors are obscured by other stage elements in a manner that feels solely about creating an interesting composition.
Mostly, though, this feels very much like we're watching canned theater. This isn't mere laziness; it does seem, especially in the particularly stripped-down and unfussy first act, like this is a deliberate choice trying to situate us relative to the action in a very certain way. The Venetian is a very presentational, artificial play, presented by three men in elaborate masquerade-like costumes, singing about the foolishness of love and all that; one of them, garishly dressed and with a terrifically long nose on his mask (Sture Lagerwall, who also has a role in the narrative; I'm not quite certain if he's meant to be the same figure in both roles), lets us know that we're about to watch a little fable about women making fools of themselves over a handsome man. It's very arch and detached, and it would feel just as arch onstage as in front of a camera, I suspect, and this seems to me to be the point. The Venetian is pretty archaic, subscribing to theatrical formulae that were centuries out of date; presenting the whole thing as a kind of ritualised, stagebound, deeply unrealistic pageant seems to me to be Bergman's way of celebrating that fact rather than attempting to hide it.
The plot of the thing is that a Milanese man, Julio (Folke Sundquist), has come to Venice for the carnival, and in so doing caught the eye of Angela (Eva Stiberg), a rich widow, and Valeria (Gunnel Lindblom), a bored married woman. They scheme for his attention, aided by their respective maids, Nena (Maud Hansson) and Oria (Helena Reuterblad). That's pretty much it; the bulk of the story (I presume there is more to it in the original) takes place in rooms where a pair of characters discuss the situation as it currently arrives, with a tone that feels less laugh-out-loud funny than cleverly dirty, to my mind. I'm watching this, mind you, filtered twice over: once through translation into Swedish, then again through English subtitles. It would be impressive indeed if any belly laughs could survive that. I do think that Bergman and the cast are trying to make it funny, if only because Hansson spends pretty much her entire role pulling faces and opening her eyes very wide.
At any rate, the simplicity of the story and the simplicity of the production feel of a piece, and while it's cute, it's not really very interesting or exciting. The banal sexist tone of the narrative, rather surprising for a director as invested in creating imposing roles for his actresses as Bergman, is somewhat offset by how good the four women in the cast are. Lindblom is the standout, pretty obviously (she was the only member of the cast to have multiple major roles in Bergman's features, though Lagerwall would later have a significant part in The Devil's Eye, a mostly-forgotten feature from 1960, and Hansson and Sundquist had small parts in a couple of Bergman films each), underplaying the comedy to get at the smug upper-class ennui of her character, but all four of the women find at least something to do here, and not even the same thing. Lagerwall also does well enough with a part that's so broad and artificial that I can't really imagine what better than "well enough" would even look like; he moves with graceful broadness, he insinuates himself with the camera, and he does a funny voice.
On the opposite side of the scale, I find Sundquist a bit of a bore; the character is a bit of a bore, but he's underlining that rather than trying to make something interesting of it. The play doesn't endorse Julio's smug self-satisfaction, but it doesn't really puncture it either, and so the part (at least in this rendering of the script) basically feels like a functional object designed to get us into the scenario. Neither Bergman nor Sundquist does much of anything with that; Julio is the rock around which the narrative breaks, and he has all the charisma and personality of a rock, too.
In short, this is pretty much a tossed-off palate cleanser, and as the first of no fewer than four filmed projects Bergman released in 1958, there's no reason to expect more of it. It's pleasant little stretching exercise, obviously designed to be fast and painless to make, as well as fast and painless to watch. Very much something for completists only but by 1958, the Bergman completist has slogged through much tougher stuff than this little bauble.
Categories: comedies, ingmar bergman, scandinavian cinema, television
