Bergman: A Year in a Life [Bergman – ett år, ett liv] **** (2018, Ingmar Bergman) – Movie Review

Director Jane Magnusson’s paints a vivid warts and all portrait of the world cinema and theatre artist Ingmar Bergman in her stupendous documentary Bergman: A Year in a Life (2018), a magnificent film buff’s paradise, both rich and strange.

The year in question is 1957, when Ingmar Bergman released two of his most highly acclaimed classic films (The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries), made a TV film and directed four plays for the theatre. But the title is a bit misleading. Magnusson actually offers not a year in the life but a whole lifetime’s look at the man and his movies, with an incredibly rich collection of archive and new interviews, as well as the clips from his vast body of work that make you want see the films again immediately. And, of course, you should, by the way, maybe starting with The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.

Magnusson even interviews Barbra Streisand, who expresses her jealousy of her then husband Elliott Gould working with Bergman (less surprisingly, Gould is also interviewed). Did you ever expect to see Barbra Streisand in a Bergman documentary? Well no, probably not. But then at the time of The Touch (1971), nobody expected to see Elliott Gould in a Bergman movie.

It is fair to agree with Magnusson that Bergman was a driven, prolific genius, an actual creative genius when the word is too easily used. Magnusson gives us plenty of actual evidence for this in excerpts from his still astounding work. It is great to remind ourselves just what a genius he was and what kind of genius. His work stayed in the profitable personal and sexual arena, after he got his politics all darned wrong following a stay in Germany before World War Two, a regular thing for middle-class Swedes at the time, when Germany was looked up to above all as a place of culture. Bergman was destined to return to live in Germany in the Seventies as a tax exile. He had clearly not given up on his love for the country.

OK, then, with the work being the ‘all’, now for the ‘warts’. Magnusson shows Bergman as a monster, afflicted by erratic and semi-abusive behaviour and a turbulent private life that included very difficult relationships with his brother, the women in his life, some of his colleagues, particularly later on, and famously with the tax authorities. Bergman was a bully, a Nazi supporter (even long after the war) and Holocaust denier, a compulsive liar, an absent father, a difficult husband and lover. He took enormous pleasure is all these things, or at least seemed to. Or maybe he was just terribly blinkered and there was just a whole lot on the personal front he was just no good at. It is hard to compute that with the film genius, though.

Among the precious moments in the film are Bergman’s appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, reducing the smug and smarmy charmer to such a nervous wreck that he calls him Ingrid Bergman and mentions The Magnificent Seven instead of The Seventh Seal as one of his movies. Bergman grandly summons Cavett to Stockholm for the occasion. Cavett humbly goes. Bergman takes sadistic delight in Cavett’s nervousness. Have you seen Cavett’s interview with Hitchcock on You Tube? You should.

Two other precious moments: the revealing TV interview with Bergman’s brother that Bergman managed to ban in his lifetime, and is now shown for the first time. And then the sad and moving interview with Liv Ullmann: ‘He was the love of my life.’

Magnusson’s documentary is celebrating the centenary of Bergman’s birth. It is a great way to celebrate, the perfect way actually, and the BFI are showing both the film and a retrospective of Bergman’s movies at the BFI Southbank in London.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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