10 Summer with Monika (1953)

***^½
Country: Sweden
Director: Ingmar Bergman

Summer with Monika wasn't the first movie Ingmar Bergman directed—in fact, it was his twelfth—but it is the best known of the films he made before becoming recognized as a major director, and the one that first brought him serious attention from film critics and filmmakers outside Sweden. Writing about the film's reissue in France in 1958, Jean-Luc Godard called it "the cinematographic event of the year." He even modeled the final shot of Jean Seberg in Breathless on a similar shot of Harriet Andersson staring insolently right at the camera in Summer with Monika. In his own debut feature, The 400 Blows, François Truffaut paid homage to the film by having the young Antoine Doinel gaze longingly at a movie poster of actress Harriet Andersson as Monika. For years unavailable on home video in the U.S., Summer with Monika has finally been released by Criterion in a remastered Region 1 DVD/Blu-ray edition that includes a fascinating twenty-five minute long interview filmed in January 2012 with its star, 80-year old Harriet Andersson.

If you think of Bergman as a man whose films deal primarily with the problems of mature, if not middle-aged, people, Summer with Monika will come as a surprise. Of all Bergman's major films, this is the closest to what might be called a youth film. In a rising and falling arc, it follows the development and dissolution of a love affair and marriage between two young people still in their teens, eighteen-year old Monika (Harriet Andersson) and nineteen-year old Harry (Lars Ekborg). The two first meet by chance in a cafe, where Monika picks up Harry and jokingly proposes that they run away together. Half an hour into the movie, that's exactly what they do. Propelled by circumstances, dissatisfaction with their lives, and resentment of interference from adults, they take Harry's father's small boat and head off for an island-hopping summer idyll of sexual exploration and escape from the tedium of normal life. "We rebelled, Monika, against all of them," Harry says.

For a while they live in a blissfully insular world, sustained by the sun and the sea, the exhilaration of sexual novelty (at least on Harry's part), and the liberating effect of freedom from responsibility. By summer's end, though, reality comes crashing in on them. Broke, disheveled, half-starved, and expecting a baby, they have no choice but to return to Stockholm, marry, and settle down to staid middle-class lives. It is at this point that the relationship begins to come apart, its disintegration hastened by their differing temperaments and social backgrounds.

Early in the film Bergman limns the personalities of Monika and Harry in just a few scenes. In their first encounter in the cafe it is clear that Monika is bold, spirited, and spontaneous while Harry is more inhibited and reactive. A few brief scenes of the two at their jobs reinforce this initial impression. Harry works in the shipping department of a ceramics and porcelain wholesaler's. It's plain that he finds the work mundane and that he is treated by his older coworkers as a scapegoat who gets the blame for everything that goes wrong, yet he tamps down his boredom and annoyance, grudgingly bearing the situation. Monika, who works in the stockroom of a greengrocer's, is harassed by her male coworkers and treated condescendingly. Her reaction, in contrast, is to stand up for herself and meet aggression with counter-aggression.

A couple of compact sequences showing the home lives of the two suggest how different is the social milieu each comes from. Harry lives a well-ordered life with his widowed father in a comfortable middle-class flat. Monika's life, on the other hand, is far more disordered and working-class. She lives in a crowded tenement, sharing a tiny, shabby flat with her harried mother, several younger siblings, and abusive alcoholic father. Hers is an untidy, chaotic environment lacking the conventionality and consistency of Harry's.

With such different personalities and backgrounds, it's no wonder that once they return to Stockholm, set up house, and become parents, their reactions to their changed circumstances are so different. Here the film moves closer to familiar Bergman territory, as it concentrates on the relationship problems of the young couple, exacerbated by incompatible expectations of their future life together. Harry's attitude is that of a realist. As soon as he learns Monika is pregnant, he begins to think of the future practically, in terms of training for a career and establishing a settled life. As he grows more mature and responsible, Monika seems to become more willful, self-centered, and erratic. To her, Harry's equable nature begins to look like innate dullness; to Harry, Monika's spontaneity begins to resemble instability. It's easy to understand why Jean-Luc Godard wrote of Monika, "Only Bergman can film men as they are loved but hated by women, and women as they are hated but loved by men."

Just as the picture's themes are in some ways unusual in Bergman's work while in other ways they look ahead to his later films, the same is true of Bergman's style in Summer with Monika. Perhaps the most singular thing about it as a Bergman film is the large role played by nature. The film opens with a silent montage of scenes of the harbor in Stockholm and contains several other extended nature montages, especially during the long middle section where Monika and Harry camp out on an island, living an almost Edenic existence. I don't recall seeing another Bergman film that dwells this much on nature as atmosphere, almost like the pillow shots in an Ozu film. In its more purely narrative sections, Monika already shows Bergman's tendency to use fully developed, play-like scenes filmed in long, continuous takes, a strategy that requires very precise staging of scenes and meticulous planning of camera moves within a scene. It's a stylistic signature Bergman would continue to use for the rest of his filmmaking career.

Near the end is one scene that shows how Bergman, whose background was in theater, recast theater effects in purely cinematic terms, a technique he would continue to expand and refine in later films. After Monika and Harry have broken up, Harry, carrying the baby, passes by the porcelain shop where he worked at the beginning of the film when he first met Monika and pauses before a large oval mirror on the front of the shop. As he gazes into it, the light within the mirror fades to black and scenes of him and Monika from earlier in the film appear in it. Then as those scenes fade, he sees reflected in the mirror the image of his household possessions—this taking place behind him in the present—being removed in preparation for his return to his father's flat. It's the kind of imaginative, succinct imagery of the coexistence of past and present within an individual's consciousness that would reach its fullest expression in later Bergman films like 1957's Wild Strawberries.

Still, the thing that might stay in your mind most tenaciously after seeing the movie is that haunting close-up of Harriet Andersson as Monika, sitting in a cafe with the man with whom she is being unfaithful to Harry, as she gazes boldly into the camera as if daring us to judge her actions. In the filmed interview included with the Criterion release of Summer with Monika, Harriet Andersson discusses how mystifying Bergman's decision to film that shot was to her and everyone involved with the movie. Looking directly into the camera was something that just wasn't done. One explanation for Bergman's defiance of movie convention may be that although it is Harry he seems to identify with, it is plainly Monika with her almost feral sexuality who is the object of his—and the camera's—adoration. That enigmatic close-up just might be his way of expressing his fascination with the troubled character and the charismatic actress playing her. (Soon after filming was completed, Bergman and Andersson began an affair). In it Bergman suspends Andersson in time and immortalizes her.



You might also like:

• Shame (1968)
  
• Cries and Whispers (1973)
• Scenes from a Marriage (1972)
• Autumn Sonata (1978)
• Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

19 Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

****
Country: Sweden
Director: Ingmar Bergman

With the possible exception of Alfred Hitchcock, no film director made as many great movies as Ingmar Bergman. And no director in movie history has more of a reputation for seriousness than Ingmar Bergman. Marital strife, parent-child conflict, childhood trauma, identity confusion, spiritual crisis, madness, war, above all death—think of a somber, disturbing, or depressing subject and chances are Bergman made a movie about it. Yet among all those serious films he is so well known for, in 1955 he made one of the most delightful romantic comedies ever filmed, Smiles of a Summer Night.

In Sweden, the time around the summer solstice, when it stays light nearly all night long as it does in all such northern latitudes, is a special time of year. This is a time for the celebration of fertility and the time when magic is believed to have its greatest power over humans, just as in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the film, which takes place sometime early in the twentieth century, we are introduced to four men and four women who come together at a rustic weekend house party in midsummer, a traditional time for losing one's inhibitions and indulging in emotionally risky behavior. Fredrik Egerman is a self-centered middle-aged lawyer who for two years has been married to Anne, a naive 19-year old. The marriage has never been consummated because of Anne's fear of sex, and Fredrik, who has resolved to wait until she is ready for sexual relations, is growing restive. When he learns that his former mistress, the actress Desirée Armfeldt, is in town appearing in a play, he can't resist going to see her. Accidentally learning of her husband's renewed interest in Desirée, Anne understandable becomes deeply upset.

Their situation is complicated by several things. Fredrik's grown son from his first marriage, Henrik, a rather priggish, sexually inexperienced theology student, is clearly in love with his stepmother Anne. The actress Desirée's current lover is a possessive, compulsively competitive Count and officer in the Swedish Army who is determined to humiliate Fredrik and drive him away from Desirée. His wife the Countess, a woman nearly as haughty as her husband, has been embittered by the Count's infidelity, dismissing love as "a loathsome thing." Completing the ensemble are the Egermans' mischievous, highly sexed maid Petra—she has already seduced young Henrik—and the philosophical coachman she encounters during the country weekend, Frid, a man whose lustiness matches her own.

Desirée comes up with a scheme to gather all these people together at her elderly mother's country house for a midsummer weekend party. After she has brought her players together, she then proceeds to use her sense of the theatrical and her knowledge of the psychology of love and sex to orchestrate a romantic farce in which her cast acts out an elaborate sexual game of Change Partners. Her mother plays her part by providing for her guests at the midsummer dinner a special wine reputed to have an aphrodisiac effect on those who drink it. This is the magic that bewitches the guests and allows Desirée to guide events to a felicitous conclusion in which romantic difficulties are resolved and everyone ends up paired with the appropriate sexual partner.

In Smiles of a Summer Night, Bergman takes a decidedly light-hearted view of sex and love. He presents sex as a game not to be taken too seriously, a game of pursuit and conquest analogous in the use of strategy by its players to a military campaign. Treating sex as a toy, his characters are in love not so much with the object of their desire as with the idea of love itself. For a male film writer and director, Bergman always showed unusual sympathy for the women in his movies. In Smiles of a Summer Night it's the women who maintain a sensible attitude toward sex and love while the men, more driven by their libidos than by good sense, generally behave like fools. Left to their own devices, the males in the picture make a mess of things. It's Desirée, conspiring with her mother and the Countess, who sorts out the muddle created by the men and manipulates the situation to the outcome that is most satisfactory for everyone.

With its complex skein of relationships and the way its characters pair off then separate, shuffle, and re-form into new pairs, this is in every sense an ensemble movie. But if pressed, I would single out three members of the cast for special attention. As Desirée, Eva Dahlbeck is intelligent, poised, and shrewd. She comes across like a goddess in Greek mythology who descends from Olympus and proceeds to maneuver people not only for her own amusement, but to ends that are best for themselves. Gunnar Björnstrand, who made nineteen movies directed by Bergman, plays Fredrik Egerman as a stoical middle-aged man whose life experience has inured him to the frustration, humiliation, and even rivalry of his own son that he must endure to continue playing the game of love. Finally there is Harriet Andersson, who brings to Petra the maid the earthy eroticism and freedom from sexual inhibition that the better educated and better-off people in the movie crave but seem too self-conscious to attain.

Gunnar Björnstrand and Eva Dahlbeck

Harriet Andersson

For those acquainted with Bergman's work, the most surprising thing about Smiles of a Summer Night is the lightness of his touch here. The picture has the delicacy of an early Lubitsch musical or one of Mozart's more airy operas, The Marriage of Figaro or Così fan tutte. Subjects that in a different context Bergman would treat with the utmost gravity—the uncertainty of human relationships, sexual jealousy, the plight of overly cerebral people trying to find happiness in life—are treated here as something to poke fun at. Even the moment late in the film when farce seems about to slide into tragedy and you think Aha! At last here comes the Bergmanesque gloom turns out to be played for laughs, a cheeky joke on the viewer. It's Bergman's most amiable and playful movie. For once he treats the human condition as the object not of spiritual agonizing, but rather of gentle mockery.

You might also like:

• Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 1: Scenes from a Marriage (1973)
• Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 2: Autumn Sonata (1978)
  
• A Study in Scarlet: Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972)
• The Shame of War: Ingmar Bergman's Shame (1968)
  

0 Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 2

"A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction," says Eva (Liv Ullmann) to her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), at one point in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978). That statement just about sums up the view of relations between parents and children that Bergman expresses in the third of his 1970s trilogy on family dynamics, following Cries and Whispers (1972), which examined sibling relations, and Scenes from a Marriage (1973), which examined the relations between husband and wife.

A brief synopsis of Autumn Sonata makes the film sound like a fairly straightforward mother-daughter psychodrama. The movie opens with Eva sitting at her desk writing a letter to her mother, Charlotte, a famous concert pianist who has just lost her lover of many years, another professional musician, after a long illness. Feeling that her mother may be in need of comfort, Eva, who has had no contact with her mother for several years (some sort of estrangement is implied), invites her to visit the isolated home in the Norwegian countryside where she lives with her husband, a minister.

When Charlotte arrives, things are understandably awkward between them at first, but as they catch up and get reacquainted with other, they seem to grow more comfortable in each other's presence. The only real problem is that Eva has not told her mother beforehand that she has removed her sister, Helena, from the institution where she had been living and is now caring for her at the house. Helena is in the advanced stages of a degenerative disease and is entirely dependent on Eva for care and can communicate only with Eva.

As Charlotte begins to accept this situation, mother and daughter appear to be relaxing and opening up to each other. This newfound intimacy, however, suddenly lurches out of control when the normally reserved Eva confronts her mother during a late night conversation, spilling out all her lifelong resentments toward Charlotte in an unexpectedly harsh and bitter diatribe. Charlotte is hurt by these accusations and defends herself as best she can. Eventually the two seem to reach a state of emotional equilibrium and at least to have aired their concerns even if they haven't completely resolved them. Charlotte soon leaves and is last seen on a train blithely discussing her upcoming concert tour with her manager, while Eva is shown sitting at a desk writing another letter to her mother expressing hopes for a better relationship in the future.

Yet as one might expect from a film directed by the magisterial Bergman, there is a great deal more going on here than meets the eye. Like Scenes from a Marriage, Autumn Sonata is basically a two-character movie (the two characters are brilliantly inhabited by the great actresses Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann), and it is the incredible complexity of those characters that is responsible for the depth, subtlety, and surprise wrung from such a seemingly simple premise.

With her wire-rimmed eyeglasses, hair braided and fastened tightly on top of her head, prominent teeth, and frumpy clothing, Liv Ullmann's Eva appears shy, plain-looking, and innocuous. But from the beginning, there are hints that all is not right with her. In the opening and closing scenes, in which she is writing to her mother, she is actually in the background as her husband directly addresses the viewer, talking about Eva and explaining what she is doing. But significantly, he refrains from commenting on why she is doing this, and something in his manner conveys unease about the decision to write her mother. We also learn later that Eva is not a happy woman, that she has lost a child and been institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital.

Eva's unexpected behavior during the late-night confrontation with her mother seems shockingly out of character. As the scene proceeds, it makes us question all the assumptions about Eva we have held until this climactic moment. We realize clearly for the first time that the timid and seemingly benign Eva is in fact deeply troubled, a passive-aggressive woman who may not even be fully aware of the true motivation behind her actions, and we understand the reason for her husband's air of unease during the opening scenes of the movie.

The percipient viewer might even have begun to wonder about Eva earlier in the movie, when she plays a piano piece for her mother, then shyly begs the reluctant Charlotte to critique her playing and perform the piece herself. This is like one of those moments in a horror movie when a character is about to open a mysterious door behind which some kind of threat is almost certainly lurking and the viewer wants to shout, "No! Don't open that door, you fool!" Yet Eva does open the door, compulsively pressing her mother into re-enacting with her a primal situation, with predictable results: humiliation for both.

After Eva's nearly hysterical confrontation with her mother, we begin to wonder about many of her actions that before seemed so forthright. Why did she contact her mother at such a vulnerable moment in Charlotte's life? Was it really, as she professed at the time, to offer comfort, or did she unconsciously sense an opportunity to attack while her opponent's defenses were weakened? Are her actions in regard to her sister Helena really as altruistic as they seem? Did she intend to use her as a pawn in a confrontation with Charlotte, an intention unacknowledged even to herself? She knew that Helena's presence in the house would unsettle Charlotte, yet she gave her no forewarning. A cynical viewer might wonder if this was to further throw Charlotte off her guard and make an unspoken accusation about Charlotte's neglect of her disabled child. After all, Eva's specific resentments about Charlotte's treatment of her as a child can be reduced to a combination of Charlotte's neglect of her family in favor of her career and her preoccupation with Eva's imperfections.

Then there is the question of why Eva decided to care for Helena in the first place. She made this decision soon after losing her own child, and Helena is as helpless as an infant. Could Eva be using her own sister as a substitute for the child she lost, not only to satisfy a psychological need to replace her dead child, but also to have another creature whose dependence on her will give her life meaning? At one point in the film, Eva says wistfully that she could be happy if only one person in the world loved her for herself. Yet this already seems true of Helena and of Eva's unbelievably patient and tolerant husband. Is she so unable to let go of the past, an adult still controlled by childhood grudges and perceived injustices centering on her mother, that she can't see what is so apparent to us, that she is already loved unconditionally by at least two people in her own household? So many things about Eva that seemed clear and simple earlier now seem opaque and ambiguous.

After that confrontation, we begin to see Charlotte in a different light too. If at first Eva was entirely sympathetic, appearing to be a victim, then Charlotte came off as comparatively unsympathetic. Under her soignée, poised exterior, she seemed a cool, aloof, and self-centered woman immersed in her career and avoiding true intimacy, a woman capable of superficial affection but not of any kind of deeper love, even for her own daughters. She treats Eva politely but is rather formal and distant with her. Something of a perfectionist, she is obviously repelled by Helena's disability.

As with Eva, after that midnight confrontation, a significant change occurs in our perceptions of Charlotte, a change that begins when we start to see Charlotte as the victim of Eva's hostile aggression. Charlotte does not react to this aggression with anger, but with mild and unresisting patience as she explains herself. She tells Eva how people of her generation are not by nature openly affectionate but that even if she did not express her love for her children, this did not mean they were unloved. She tells Eva of the personal difficulties in her marriage and of how the importance to her of her art often created conflict between the demands of her career and the needs of her family. She abashedly acknowledges that even though she tried to balance these things, in the end she invariably chose art over family. The viewer gets the impression that this is certainly the most intimate and self-revealing conversation Charlotte has ever had with her daughter, and possibly with anyone. We begin to see Charlotte as a more complex and sensitive woman than we did before—not simply a selfish person, but one defined by her own emotional limitations.

This dropping of masks and reversal of personalities hearkens back yet again to Bergman's Persona (1966). More and more, it seems to me that Persona is the seminal film in Bergman's later body of work, for so much in his later films seems to flow directly from that movie. For one thing, in Charlotte Autumn Sonata has as one of its main characters an artist. By the end of the movie, we see that Eva and Charlotte, far from being opposites in personality as they appeared at the beginning, are actually more alike than they believe. Both mother and daughter are self-absorbed almost to the point of narcissism. They are both overly sensitive to their own moods and feelings yet find it difficult to express their emotions.

The crucial difference between the two, though—the thing that allows Charlotte to move forward while Eva remains trapped nursing childhood grievances that have become a permanent part of her adult personality—is Charlotte's art. Artists may be no less selfish than the rest of us, but they have the expressive means of externalizing their inner lives. As Charlotte tells Eva, "Only through my music did I have the chance to show my feelings." It is significant that at the end of the movie Charlotte is seen traveling in a train to her next concert, while Eva is shown sitting at the same desk as at the beginning of the movie, doing the same thing—writing a letter to Charlotte as her husband looks on in resignation. In that letter she expresses sentiments of forgiveness and hope for a better relationship with her mother in the future that, in view of all that has happened in the film, simply do not seem realistic.

The other key element Autumn Sonata shares with Persona is the concept of the fundamental subjectivity of the individual human experience, what David Thomson calls Bergman's belief in "the harrowing separateness of people." In Bergman's later work, we see illustrated again and again the idea that we are each of us trapped inside ourselves, and that ordinary human attempts at communication are by their nature imperfect and fraught with emotional danger. This is the world view from which the later films grow.

Autumn Sonata, like its companion films on the family, shows that the emotional demands, both explicit and implicit, that we make on those we love temper love's sustaining qualities with an equally powerful ability to harm. In Autumn Sonata Bergman tells yet again a story of individuals that gives the viewer an intensive, microcosmic picture of all human relationships. That Eva and Charlotte can love each other only from a distance merely emphasizes the larger concept of the universal and unbridgeable distance between all human beings, even when they are related by blood, and when they share the emotional bond of love.

0 Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 1

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972), in which I discussed Bergman's emphasis in that film on the family dynamics among the three sisters who are its main characters. Before the decade was over, Bergman would make two other films that, taken together with Cries and Whispers, form what could be considered a trilogy in which he examines how various members of the family relate to one other: Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and Autumn Sonata (1978).

Whereas Cries and Whispers concentrated on sibling relations, Scenes from a Marriage deals, as the title indicates, with relations between husband and wife. Originally made as a six-hour long mini-series for Swedish television, it was later edited by Bergman into a 167-minute movie, the version I watched, and released in the US in 1974. (Because it was first shown on television, it was ruled ineligible for the Academy Awards.) The film opens with a scene that is ambiguous: A man and woman—clearly identifiable as Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, two actors who had appeared in a number of Bergman's films—are sitting on a sofa in what appears to be an upper middle-class living room being interviewed. At first it is uncertain whether they are characters in the movie or the actors who play them discussing their characters, as in Bergman's The Passion of Anna (1969).


Within a few minutes, though, it is clear that these actors were from the beginning in character. The couple being interviewed for a magazine profile are Marianne (Ullmann) and Johan (Josephson). She is a lawyer in her thirties; he is a university professor of experimental psychology in his forties. They have been married for ten years and have two daughters. The interview is in part a clever way of succinctly presenting the background of these people and sketching their personality traits (or as we later find out, the self-images they present to each other and the world) and the way they relate to each other. Johan seems confident and more or less in control of the relationship, while she seems more reserved and behaves deferentially toward him. The image of their marriage they present to the interviewer is one of stability, of two complementary personalities who have achieved a relationship of contented equilibrium.

This scene is followed by a strangely contrasting one. Marianne and Johan are entertaining their friends Katarina (Bibi Andersson) and Peter (Jan Malmsjö), and all are seated at the table in the dining room. The profile of the couple has been published, and Johan reads it aloud, sarcastically ridiculing the idealized picture of the couple it presents, as Marianne smiles and nods in agreement. Yet what he reads accurately reflects the image they presented to the interviewer, and it is clear from their expressions that the couple are secretly pleased with the result.

This kind of irony—possible only with the most masterful actors, those capable of suggesting simultaneous contradictory emotions—hearkens back to Bergman's Persona (1966), with its theme that we all wear masks that conceal our inner selves and that in a sense we are all actors giving a performance for the world at large and for each other. In the dinner scene, taken in conjunction with the opening scene of the interview, Bergman implies that this is also true of married couples, as they present a united front to the world. And, as we will discover in the course of the movie, he further implies that this is true within the marriage itself, in the way the two people in a marriage tend to hold something of themselves back from each other.

The irony of the scene does not end here, though. Later in the meal it becomes apparent that the marriage of Katarina and Peter is in serious trouble, and as Marianne and Johan look on in obvious discomfort, their friends begin tearing into each other with an escalating viciousness reminiscent of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The subjects of contention are those typical of bourgeois marriages everywhere: fidelity, money, careers, goals that have begun to diverge, waning sexual interest in each other. The irony of the situation is that even though we won't learn it for a while, these are exactly the areas of dispute that will arise later when cracks begin to develop in Marianne and Johan's seemingly ideal marriage.

When Johan announces out of the blue that he has been having an affair with a graduate student he is advising (how many times have you heard of that situation?) and is leaving Marianne to take up a new teaching post in the US, their calcified marriage begins to crumble. The rest of the movie traces the evolution of relations between Marianne and Johan over the course of the next several years—from a bitter separation, trenchant post mortems about the reasons for the end of the marriage, divorce, the collapse of Johan's career plans, disputes over maintenance and child support, to the eventual remarriage of both. So chaotic is the trajectory of their relations that at one point while all this is happening, Johan asks aloud, "Are we living in utter confusion?"

The movie ends ten years after it began, in a sense coming full circle. Marianne and Johan, involved in unhappy marriages to others, are now secret lovers sneaking away for a tryst at the country vacation home where Johan first confessed his affair to Marianne and told her that their marriage was over. Earlier in the movie, Johan told Marianne that they were like children trying to make sense of the adult world. The intervening ten years since we were introduced to them in that gripping first scene have been difficult for both, but at the end of the movie they seem at last to have grown up.

Because it was originally made for television, Scenes from a Marriage uses the conventional TV aspect ratio of 1:33 : 1. Structured around six episodic "chapters," the movie consists largely of dialogue rather than action and is shot mostly in the talking-heads close-up style typical of the small screen. The strictures of this format had major effects on the movie. For one thing, they required Bergman to write a screenplay in which dialogue does practically everything—conveys information, illuminates character traits, and explains the progression of his main characters through the phases of the transformative changes they undergo. The dialogue must be clear, focused, naturalistic and literal. It must be an exact fit for both the characters and the actors who portray them. Bergman accomplishes this with absolute mastery.

The limitations imposed by this format also required Bergman to simplify his style. If the chief means of showing the nature of Marianne and Johan's relationship is through their conversations, then the visual novelty and stylistic flourishes we associate with Bergman's previous work would only be distractions. Bergman reduces his visual style to essentials, resulting in one of the most stylistically minimalist films he ever made. Yet the film is never boring, so strong are the writing and acting, and so unfailingly apposite are the choices Bergman makes from his relatively basic visual palette.

Because of the heavy reliance on dialogue and the extensive use of close-ups, the movie could only succeed if the actors playing Marianne and Johan convincingly merge with their characters. I am specifically referring to Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who appear in every scene, occasionally alone but almost always together. (Other actors in the cast appear in no more than one sequence.) These actors must carry a movie that even in its edited version runs nearly three hours, and they do so brilliantly, right from that opening interview sequence, which portends one of the greatest strengths of the movie: In the first couple of minutes we see the actors settle into their roles and become the characters, and they never let up for the remainder of the film.

This must have been especially challenging for Ullmann, who had played lead roles in five Bergman films in the previous seven years and was therefore quite recognizable to those familiar with the director's work. The role of Marianne was the most conventional character she had at the time played for Bergman—a contemporary professional, a complacent middle-class wife and mother untroubled by personal demons—yet she disappears into the role, carrying the viewer along with her on her unanticipated journey. As Marianne, she sees the world she blithely took for granted disintegrate and experiences the most intense and disturbing emotions of her life when she leaves behind the sheltered existence she led with Johan. After she learns to let go of her bitterness toward Johan and forgive him, she is able to become more confident, mature, and independent, and more open about her sexuality. She finds a real identity outside her marriage and emerges a stronger and more resilient woman.

Like Ullmann, Josephson had also appeared in several of Bergman's films, but in smaller and less prominent roles. Bergman had the rare knack of creating highly individualized female characters and placing them in stories in which they dominate the narrative and are the most memorable people in the movie, particularly in his later career, say from Persona (1966) on. Scenes from a Marriage, however, is essentially a two-character movie in which the main male and female characters are given equal weight. With so much responsibility for the success of the movie resting on his performance, Josephson clearly proves himself up to the challenge of sharing the screen with such a strong and distinctly defined presence as Ullmann's Marianne. Like her, Josephson's Johan is an utterly ordinary man, not the writer, musician, or painter who is so often the chief male character in Bergman's movies. And unlike the spiritual and artistic torments of those characters, Johan's problems and insecurities are the ordinary ones common to middle-class, middle-aged men everywhere.

A few years older than his wife, he has reached the point in his life at which he begins to question the worth of his accomplishments and to aspire to something more ambitious, something he believes will be more significant and satisfying. He sees the means of this personal and psychological fulfillment in career advancement and a renewed sex life with a younger wife. (Since the birth of their second daughter, his sex life with Marianne has been minimal.) That he is later unsuccessful in achieving these things eventually makes him question his decision to divorce Marianne and move on. Yet like Marianne, in spite of his confusion and suffering—or is it really because of it?—he seems by the end of the movie to have grown. Johan has lost much of his self-centered arrogance and discontent with the course of his life, becoming more humble and more accepting of the way his life has turned out.

Perhaps the most important change among all those they have undergone, though, is that both Marianne and Johan have adjusted their expectations about love to a more realistic level. "We love each other in an earthly, imperfect way," Johan tells Marianne at the end of the film, and it is hard to find fault with that painfully acquired insight.

---

In 2003 Bergman, who died in 2007, made a movie for Swedish television (his last work) titled Saraband that involves Marianne visiting Johan at his country home some 30 years later. As in Scenes from a Marriage, Marianne and Johan are played by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson.

0 A Study in Scarlet: Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers

Bergman insists on the truths of how people feel toward others they need to love.

—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

From Wild Strawberries (1957) to his final feature film, Fanny and Alexander (1982), the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman returned again and again to stories about the family, about the ways that members of a family relate to one another, the ways they grant and withhold intimacy, the ways they conceal or reveal their true feelings for one another. Along with Through a Glass Darkly (1961), his 1972 film Cries and Whispers is probably his most concentrated and focused examination of family dynamics.

At an upper middle-class country estate around 1900, two sisters, Karina (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), have come to be present as their eldest sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), dies after a long illness, probably cancer. Agnes is cared for by her long-time servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). These are the main characters in the movie, although other characters—Agnes's doctor (Erland Josephson), the sisters' mother (also played by Liv Ullmann), Maria's daughter (played by Linn Ullmann, the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman), Karina's and Maria's husbands, and a handful of others—appear briefly.

Bergman was a master at creating highly individualized and complex female characters, a rarity in male directors and one of the most remarkable things about him as a screenwriter and film director. In Cries and Whispers he has done this four times over. Agnes, the eldest sister, is a loving and warm woman. (The name Agnes is derived from the Latin for "lamb.") She is unmarried, and her relationship with the servant Anna suggests she might be a lesbian. Karina, the middle sister, is a cold, withdrawn, self-centered woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a domineering and equally cold older man. Maria, the youngest sister, is flirtatious, promiscuous (in the past she had an affair with Agnes's doctor, which caused her husband to attempt suicide when he discovered it), and also self-centered, but warmer and more sensual than Karina. The servant Anna, who is about the same age as the sisters, is a simple, selfless woman devoted to her mistress and of the four women in the household the only one who is openly religious. No mention is made of a husband, but she did once have a daughter, now dead.

We learn these things about the women not only from the way they treat each other, but from details about their pasts that are subtly interpolated into the plot as very short flashbacks. Childhood memories of a brief glance at a doll's house and of a Twelfth Night celebration with a magic lantern limn a contented childhood for Agnes and Maria. Karin's most vivid childhood memory, in contrast, is of her cold jealousy for the affection given by their mother to Maria. The childhood dynamics of these three sisters are stunningly observed: the confidence and maturity of the eldest sister, the feeling of being excluded and starved of attention of the middle sister, and the pampered special position of the youngest and prettiest sister. It is easy to see how these experiences as children prefigure the personalities and behavior of the three sisters as adults, especially in the pressured environment of the present situation.

The reactions of Karin and Maria to the coming death of their eldest sister clearly indicate how unnerved and frightened they are by the idea of death and the inevitability of their own deaths. After Agnes dies (about halfway through the movie), there is a stunning dream sequence that vividly shows this fear. It is not clear whose dream it is (at one point the dead Agnes says it is her dream); it is likely that the sequence is a cinematic conceit intended by Bergman to represent a collective dream. In the dream the dead Agnes, laid out on her bed in her funeral attire (which eerily resembles that of a baby), calls Anna to her in the night and asks her to bring each of her sisters to her. First Karin then Maria gingerly enters the room, is overcome with fright, and immediately turns and leaves. Only the religious Anna, who seems to accept death as a natural occurrence, consents to stay with her mistress and is seen in a final shot cradling Agnes, curled in the fetal position, in her arms, almost like a Pietà. Most of this sequence is shot in tight close-up and with few edits, making the expressions on the faces plain to read.

Anna cradles the dead Agnes in her arms

The second half of the movie deals with events that happen after the death of Agnes. Karin, Maria, and their husbands are quite businesslike and unsentimental about wrapping up the estate and dismissing the faithful Anna. Far from being a transformative event, the death of their eldest sister has only hardened the personalities of Karin and Maria. The one possibility for change occurs when the shaken Maria confronts Karin and pleads with her to accept her affection. Resisting Maria's overtures, Karin loses control of her tightly reined-in emotions and tells her younger sister how much she hates her. But Maria persists, and finally Karin (who can't bear to be touched) responds, the two embrace, and a new intimacy seems to have been created. Near the end of the movie, though, just before they part, the mercurial Maria disavows this new relationship as just a passing whim and leaves Karin alone and isolated once again. It is the final and most potent example in the movie of what David Thomson calls Bergman's "convictions of the harrowing separateness of people, the intractable privacy of men and women."

In a recent post on Bergman's Shame, I wrote of the precise balance in his best films between the thematic and the narrative, between ideas and people interacting in emotionally charged situations, and attributed this to his background in theater. (Bergman was involved in theater from his days as a student at Stockholm University, later managing several theater companies. For several years in the 1960s he was director of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm.) This theater-influenced approach to film, which is more apparent in his movies of the 1960s and 1970s than in his earlier work, is on full display in Cries and Whispers, with its plot reminiscent of the family dramas of Ibsen and Chekhov.

Added to this balancing of ideas and characters is the theatrical staging of the action and the overall look of the movie, with its strong emphasis on composition, on the placement of objects and people within the frame and their limited movement within a confined space. Cries and Whispers is in the literal sense of the term a chamber piece. Nearly all of the action takes place in Agnes's country house—in the sitting rooms, in the dining room, in Anna's room, and most vividly in Agnes's bedroom, which is, of course, also her sickroom and the scene of her death and laying out. I can't think of another film by Bergman with such a strong sense of being influenced by stage sets.

Perhaps the most obvious indication of this is the use of an identifiable color scheme in the movie, only Bergman's second film shot in color. The predominant color in this scheme is red, with white, black, and the occasional gray the other colors in the scheme. Every room in the house is painted an intense red color, like those red rooms in paintings by Matisse. The dresses the sisters wear are often red or rust colored. The nightclothes, the bed linens, the linen in the dining room, and the clothing Agnes is laid out in are pristine white. The furniture is of dark mahogany or black lacquer and, of course, the clothing worn after the death of Agnes is mourning black. There is no blue or yellow in the movie, and even the outdoor foliage is drained of color because the movie takes place in the fall. And whereas movies conventionally fade to black or occasionally white, the fade-outs in Cries and Whispers are always to red. This saturation of the images in the color red may perhaps be intended to remind the viewer of blood. After all, there are a lot of open emotional wounds on display in the movie. But blood is also essential to life. When something is referred to as bloodless, it is lacking in vitality, and the result of anemia is a dearth of the nutrients necessary for life.

Maria, Karin, and Anna in the red sitting room

Each of the three actresses who play the sisters had a long association with Bergman, and each had memorable roles in several of his films. All give beautifully accomplished performances. Thulin has perhaps the most difficult role as the unlikable, neurotic Karin, whose childhood alienation still governs her life and her reactions to her sisters. Ullmann must suppress her natural intelligence and sensitivity to play the frivolous and inconstant Maria, and she does this convincingly, with her red-gold hair and simpering mannerisms. But it is Harriet Andersson who dominates the movie, even though she dies halfway through, as the eldest sister who manages to retain her nobility and selflessness even as she ventures more than once to the brink of death, gasping in agony, only to be pulled back to life again by the devoted Anna, before finally dying suddenly and quietly. These near-death scenes are truly disturbing and the most demanding of any performer in the movie. This marvelous ensemble is completed by the plain, Rubenesque Sylwan—who appeared in only seven movies between 1956 and 1982 but easily holds her own with the veteran Bergman actresses—as the earthy, maternal Anna, the life force of the movie and the person who holds the household together.

The movie opens and closes with two brilliant sequences. It begins with a brief montage of morning scenes in the garden outside the house before moving indoors as clocks in the various rooms strike. We then see a close-up of Agnes's face as she wakes. For a few seconds, her face registers disorientation, then—and Andersson conveys this with absolute clarity—we see the dawning realization of where she is and the sudden memory that she is dying. It is a heart-rending moment. As Agnes is gripped by a spasm of pain, one small tear forms in each eye. She gets out of bed and walks to the window, where she gazes at an allée of leafless trees in late autumn. (In that opening montage, the garden appeared to be in summer. Was that Agnes's dream?) After winding the clock on the mantel, she goes to her writing desk, opens her journal, and writes a short entry: "It is morning, and I am in pain."

The movie ends in another brilliant sequence that tempers all the pain, unsettling memories, and uncertainty that have occurred in the hour and a half since that opening sequence. After the sisters and their husbands have left, Anna stays behind to clear the house. She has been offered a memento of Agnes and has declined the offer. ("She's playing her role well," comments Karin's lawyer husband condescendingly.) But she has kept one thing of Agnes's of which the sisters are unaware: her journal. The movie opened with Agnes getting out of bed and writing a brief entry in that journal. Now Anna picks up the journal and begins to read in voice-over as we are shown what she is describing.

Anna and the three sisters stroll in the autumnal garden

It is a day in early September, and Agnes's sisters have arrived for their visit. For the first time in the movie since the opening montage, the action takes place outdoors. Dressed completely in white summer outfits and carrying white parasols, the three sisters, accompanied by Anna, dressed in pale gray, are strolling through the autumnal grounds, the trees and earth covered with brown leaves. They come to their childhood swing and sit down, Karin and Maria facing away from the camera and Agnes opposite them facing the camera. Agnes no longer has the haggard look of a dying woman wracked with pain. She now resembles the healthy and beautiful Harriet Andersson of earlier Bergman films. And she looks peaceful and contented. As Anna pushes the swing, the camera moves in to a close-up of Agnes, who thinks to herself: "Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes I can experience perfection. [She closes her eyes.] And I feel profoundly grateful to my life which gives me so much."

Perhaps for Bergman this is what the art of cinema is all about: capturing in the midst of pain, the unstoppable passage of time, death, and the certainty that each of us is ultimately alone (the cries?) those fleeting, still moments of perfection (the whispers?) that briefly bring us peace and contentment.

0 The Shame of War

Movies can express radically different attitudes toward war. They can be as partisan as the hundreds of patriotic films turned out by American and British studios during World War II, as anti-war as powerful films like All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory, or in rare instances as detached as Jean Renoir's great movie La Grande Illusion. So rich is the genre that it has many identifiable sub-genres—from combat movies to prisoner-of-war movies to movies about holding down the home front to movies showing the aftermath of warfare as populations transition back to peace—a clear indication of the fertility of the genre. What nearly all war movies have in common though is that they are set within the context of a specific war. We know who the two sides are and at least roughly why they are fighting. And almost always we know on which side of the conflict the screenwriter and director stand.

This was not the approach taken by the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman when he decided to tackle the subject. Previous films by Bergman had dealt peripherally with war. In The Seventh Seal (1957), the medieval knight played by Max von Sydow is returning home from one of the crusades when he has his famous encounter with Death. In Persona (1966), the actress played by Liv Ullmann, who has had a nervous breakdown and stopped speaking, is haunted by images of Buddhist monks in Vietnam immolating themselves to protest the war then happening in their country. The movie Bergman made next, Shame (1968), was his first to deal exclusively with war.

But unlike other filmmakers, Bergman made a point of making the war depicted in Shame as non-specific as possible. About all we're really sure of is that there is a war raging in the unnamed country where the movie is set. We don't know why the war started or what the issues are. We're not even sure who the two sides are or what political philosophies they represent. One side calls the other invaders; that side calls themselves liberators. There are indications that this might actually be a civil war of some kind and that this labeling of the other side as invaders or oppressors is simply an example of wartime propaganda.

Shame opens in a darkened bedroom with two people sleeping in separate beds. An alarm clock rings, and one of the two figures stirs but does not rise. The other figure, a woman, snaps awake, sleepily gets out of bed, flings open the curtains, flooding the room with light, and walks to a jug and basin and begins washing. The first figure, a man, lingers in bed a few moments then slowly sits up, puts on his eyeglasses, takes a pill of some kind, and sits there with a stony and dispirited expression on his face. The two people are Eva Rosenberg (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Jan (Max von Sydow), former violinists in a symphony orchestra that has disbanded because of the war and who now live as refugees in a primitive farmhouse on a remote island, where they grow lingonberries. Their existence here is not so much one of bleakness as of life reduced to its essentials. Their house is lit with oil lamps but they have a battered old station wagon, and a telephone and radio that sometimes work.

Later they sit at the table eating breakfast. She is dressed and ready to begin their day, which will consist of taking the ferry to another island to deliver two boxes of lingonberries. He sits in his pajamas, unshaven, and tells her of the dream he had—that they were once again playing in the orchestra and that the life they live now was behind them, like a nightmare. "I woke up crying," he says to her. This first sequence tells us a great deal about these two people by showing us the way war has affected them and influenced the dynamics of their relationship.

Eva is resilient. Self-controlled without quite being cold, she organizes and regulates their life together. She has not lost her capacity for pleasure even in the face of the straitened conditions and political uncertainty in which they live. When they sell their berries for more than they anticipated, she suggests buying a bottle of wine to celebrate. Nor has she altogether abandoned hope for the future. As they drink the wine together outside under a tree, she talks animatedly to Jan of her love for him and her desire for children.

Jan, on the other hand, is close to being a broken man. Like most depressed people, he has turned inward, dwelling on his misery, and with the exception of Eva seems scarcely able to connect to those around him. Moody and withdrawn, he is emotionally dependent on Eva's nurturing strength and barely able to keep going from day to day. He can no longer even play his instrument. He may even be impotent. Not only do they sleep in separate beds, but Eva's talk of children, of their emotional commitment to each other, and of their future clearly makes him uncomfortable. He accuses her of being angry all the time; she accuses him of being weak. "Pull yourself together," she tells him at one point, impatient with his self-pity. "I do."

So far Jan and Eva seem to have adjusted to their life in exile, and if they must endure a certain amount of physical deprivation, at least they appear to have escaped the conflict raging on the mainland and to live in relative safety. Their comparatively peaceful life soon collapses though. As they sit under the trees sipping their wine and chatting, the rural silence is suddenly shattered by the scream of low-flying jet fighters racing across the sky. One of the planes explodes, and running toward the wreckage, Jan finds its pilot hanging from a tree. From this point on, Jan and Eva experience the full gamut of the horrors of war.

Their farm is invaded first by enemy troops, then by local troops. Arrested and accused of collaboration with the enemy, Jan is interrogated and beaten while Eva listens from the next room. They are subjected to stage-managed psychological intimidation then arbitrarily told by Mayor Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand), supposedly a friend of the couple, to return home. He tells Jan that the authorities knew he wasn't a traitor, "but we had to make an example of you." Making their way home, Jan and Eva wander through a stark, bombed-out, burned-out landscape of devastation.

After returning home, they are visited by the mayor, who makes an overt sexual pass at Eva while Jan looks on. Later Jan sees them together in the greenhouse, where they appear to be having sex. At this point guerrilla fighters, who have been hiding in the woods, show up looking for the mayor and in a powerfully dynamic sequence completely wreck the house, smashing everything in it, and finally blowing it up. During this long sequence the only sounds are those of the house being destroyed. Afterward, Jan finds his antique violin lying outside in the dust, smashed to pieces, and this, along with the discovery of what he believes to be Eva's betrayal, is the final blow to his humanity. The loss of the last meaningful connection to his former life and of Eva's fidelity causes him to lose his moral bearings completely: when the guerrillas put a pistol in Jan's hand and demand that he execute the mayor, at first he drops the pistol in revulsion, then hesitantly picks it up and shoots the mayor several times.

This is the first but not the last time in the movie that Jan kills. After the guerrillas leave and Jan and Eva are living in their greenhouse, an exhausted young soldier turns up, and Jan seizes his rifle and leads him down the road. Jan returns alone, carrying the young soldier's shoes, and tells Eva that a boat will be leaving for the mainland soon. Shocked at what Jan has apparently done—"You killed him for his shoes?" she asks, incredulous—and at what he has become, she at first refuses then agrees to go with him. The last scenes in the movie show the couple clinging to each other as they drift, along with a handful of other refugees, in a small open boat on a vast sea that fills the frame.

By stripping all specific context from the war happening around Eva and Jan, Bergman focuses on the human effects of war on those unwillingly caught up in it, making Shame one of the most moving of all anti-war films. Jan and Eva are completely apolitical. They don't understand what this war is about, and they support neither side. The thrust of the film is entirely on the effects war has on these two people, who are trapped in an unreal situation and want only to avoid its harsh consequences.

Yet the war's toll on them is great. It destroys Jan, causing him to lose not only his dignity, but also his humanity. Bergman may allow the camera to linger almost obsessively on Liv Ullmann's expressive face, radiant in its unadorned, earthy beauty. But it is really von Sydow, his face growing progressively more haggard and his expression more tormented as he slowly unravels under the soul-destroying experience of life during wartime, who is the center of the movie. The war also destroys Jan and Eva's marriage by turning their relationship from one based on love and shared values to one based on necessity and desperation. A relationship based on the desire to share a common future devolves into one based on dependence on each other for physical and psychological survival, and characterized not by mutual respect but by mistrust and suspicion.

Shame, like Bergman's best films, strikes a precisely calibrated balance between the thematic and the narrative. I have always thought of Bergman as the most literary of the great film directors. By this I mean that his movies function simultaneously on both the intellectual and the human levels. His movies deal with ideas, but they also deal with complex and clearly defined individuals interacting in compelling situations. Perhaps it is Bergman's background in theater that accounts for this ability to explore weighty, abstract subjects through emotionally engaging stories that are both personal and specific.

Shame is an incredibly dense movie. At just 103 minutes, fairly short by current standards, it is far richer in narrative incident than my cursory description of the plot indicates. Bergman weaves into the film's plot incidents that touch on a remarkable number of the ramifications of war—among them the control of entire populations through mass psychological manipulation, the use of film as a propaganda tool, the devaluing of beauty and art, and the sanctioning of inhumane impulses that would never be tolerated in peacetime. Its quiet early section—with its depiction of a static, almost ascetic life—draws the viewer in before suddenly giving way to a vision of constantly accelerating instability and the inexorable disintegration of the tentative security that Jan and Eva have found in their island refuge. Its visualizations of the violence and destruction that occur as a result are memorably vivid and truly harrowing.

Bergman's perennial subject is personal suffering. In Shame the source of this suffering is not internal and spiritual as in so many of his films, but external and specific. Shame deals not with existential pain, but with man-made pain. In this sense, it is a movie for those wary of Bergman. There are no dreams or hallucinations, no religious allegory, no obscure symbolism, no abstruse reality-and-illusion puzzles. Its plot is calculated to drive home in a realistic way the simple message that war is humankind's most cruel and dehumanizing creation. By limiting the scale of the military conflict in the movie and concentrating on its toll on ordinary non-participants, Bergman created a timeless anti-war film that still has great relevance more than forty years later. If you have any doubt about that statement, just watch a news program or read a newspaper with good international coverage, and note how many stories deal with small-scale regional conflicts like the one depicted in Shame and their effects—the fear, pain, confusion, and humiliation—on local populations and on individuals like Jan and Eva Rosenberg.

0 A Cinematic Feast: Great Movie Dining Scenes, Part 2

This week I am continuing the post I began two weeks ago, about my favorite dining scenes in movies.

•Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson (1970). The scene in the diner where Jack Nicholson tries in vain to order a plain chicken salad sandwich is remembered by everyone who has seen this movie. The confrontation with the implacable waitress is used by the writer (Carol Eastman) and the director to reveal details about Robert Eroica Dupea's (Jack Nicholson) character: he's a fearless, obnoxious, rude, boorish, and frustrated loudmouth who isn't going to endure anyone's insolence. The scene also serves a larger purpose—to lambaste the conformist, one-size-fits-all, no-substitutions mentality of mainstream American society. The scene is an unforgettable blend of food and politics, a bitter jeremiad with Nicholson as the haranguing prophet.

•The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola (1972). Near the mid-point of this movie comes a crucial scene set in a small restaurant in Brooklyn. Deeply offended by the attempted assassination of his father and by his own mistreatment by a corrupt police official, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is to meet with the policeman and the head of the rival family responsible for the attempt on his father's life. The meeting will take place at the restaurant, where a pistol will be hidden in the bathroom. The plan is that Michael will retrieve the gun and shoot the two other men. We see Michael searching for the gun, but we do not see for sure if he finds it. He has been told to come out of the bathroom firing, but when he does come out, he walks quietly back to the table and sits down. Pacino's troubled facial expressions in the scene that follows are riveting. Is his obvious discomfort because there was no gun in the bathroom? Having been warned that the men will attempt to kill him at the meeting, is he now preparing himself to face certain death? Or did he indeed find the gun but is now having second thoughts about killing the men, an act that would be out of character for Michael as he has been presented in the earlier parts of the film?

Having kept us on tenterhooks for several tense minutes, Coppola finally reveals the answer when Michael suddenly pulls the gun from his pocket, shoots the two men, and calmly walks out of the restaurant. The scene is pivotal in the development of the character of Michael in that from this point on, he changes from a static character who has distanced himself from the family's criminal activities ("That's my family, Kay. It's not me," he tells his girl friend in the very first sequence of the movie) to a character in transition. At the end of the movie, Michael is a very different person from the one he was at the beginning, and it is this scene in the restaurant that sets in motion the sequence of events that will cause the transformation in Michael's nature and eventually lead to his becoming the new godfather.

•You Can Count on Me, Kenneth Lonergan, (2000). Samantha Prescott (Laura Linney) and her brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) have been out of touch for several months, and Sammy doesn't understand why. When Terry finally contacts her and arranges to visit, she suggests they meet in a restaurant. At first the reuinion appears to be going well and the two siblings are getting pleasantly reacquainted. But Sammy is puzzled that her gentle but persistent probing about where Terry has been for the last few months is met with evasiveness.

Finally Terry reluctantly reveals that he has spent the last months in jail. At this the strait-laced Sammy quietly explodes, and in an instant the entire mood of the occasion changes. Sammy is barely able to conceal her suppressed anger from the other diners—this is a rather nice restaurant, and she and her brother are well-behaved middle-class adults—while Terry responds with abashed guilt and shame. The scene is a marvel both of controlling and expressing emotion and of character revelation, all achieved through brilliant dialogue, direction, and acting.

•Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (1983). Is there anyone who hasn't already guessed which scene I've chosen from this movie? It is, naturally, the one in which the grossly overweight Mr. Creosote (Terry Jones) eats himself to death in a very formal and rather snobbish restaurant. After consuming a huge amount of food and literally inflating with each successive course, he is reluctantly tempted by the waiter (John Cleese) to consume one last tidbit. This proves too much for Mr. Creosote, who explodes (literally), showering the restaurant and other diners with half-digested French cuisine, a sort of culinary version of John Hurt giving birth in Alien. Python sketches are always gloriously silly, but that silliness is generally used to make a point. The point here seems to be not just the gluttony of one person, but the fanatical addiction to consumerism—and the vulnerability to incessant inducements to comsume more, more, more—of Western culture. The scene is an illustration of suicide by overconsumption. Whether you find it funny or offensive, once you've seen it, you are not likely to forget it anytime soon.

•North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock (1959). This is not only my favorite Hitchcock film but my favorite movie of all time, so how could I not include it? The hero, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) first gets to know the heroine, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), during a meal in the dining car of a train to Chicago when he is seated at her table just as she finishes eating. The scene is filled with sexual badinage that clearly conveys the immediate sexual attraction between the two:

GRANT: The moment I meet an attractive woman I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
SAINT: What makes you think you have to conceal it?

SAINT: I never discuss love on an empty stomach.
GRANT: You've already eaten.
SAINT: But you haven't.

In truth, Hitchcock's movies are full of noteworthy meals (is this really so remarkable, given Hitchcock's considerable girth?), and I could have chosen a scene from any of a number of his movies. Memorable dining scenes occur in Sabotage, where Sylvia Sydney takes out her anger at her husband, who's responsible for the death of her young brother, with a carving knife ; in Shadow of a Doubt, where the wholesome family and adoring niece unwittingly share the family table with the Merry Widow Murderer; in To Catch a Thief, where Grace Kelly and Cary Grant share a picnic on the Riviera after a hair-raising ride in Kelly's sports car ("Breast or thigh?" asks Kelly mischievously, offering Grant some cold chicken); in Vertigo, when James Stewart takes the newly transformed Kim Novak to dinner at Ernie's restaurant; in Frenzy, when Vivien Merchant proudly whips away the large dome covering a platter to reveal a supper of minuscule proportions, Hitchcock's skewering of the then-fashionable cuisine minceur. And who can ever forget Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh eating those sandwiches in a shabby motel room overlooked by stuffed birds (and containing a concealed peephole into the bathroom of the adjoining cabin)?

•Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen (1986). Thanksgiving is the most American of all feast holidays, and it is the occasion Woody Allen chooses to open this film and, exactly one year later, to conclude it. The first meal serves to introduce us to the main characters, Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her family, and to Hannah's husband Elliot (Michael Caine) and his sexual obsession with her sister Lee (Barbara Hershey). At the second Thanksgiving meal we see how all the various plot elements have turned out. Most importantly, we see that Elliot's obsession with Lee has come to an end and that Hannah's other sister, the flaky Holly (Dianne Wiest), has taken up with the equally eccentric Mickey Sachs (Woody Allen). The two meals that bookend the movie are wonderfully detailed social occasions that also serve as the essential organizing elements of the narrative.

•Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman (1982). It seems appropriate to follow a movie that contains a notable celebration of Thanksgiving with one that contains a notable celebration of Christmas, and to follow a movie directed by Woody Allen with one directed by his idol, Ingmar Bergman. The sequence in question, which opens the movie, lasts nearly a full hour and must be one of the most richly detailed and lengthy meals in all cinema. The sequence begins with the preparations for a family Chistmas Eve dinner at the house of Helena Ekdahl, the matriarch of the family, where the housemaids are elaborately decorating the tree and placing presents for the children under it.

The scene then shifts to the theater that her son Oscar manages, as did his father before him. The end of a beautifully staged Nativity play is shown, followed by a festive backstage dinner for the theater staff given by Oscar. At one point he haltingly makes a speech to the staff about the importance of their work: "Perhaps we give the people who come here the chance to forget for a while...the world outside. Our theater is a little room of orderliness, routine, care, and love."

Back at Grandmother Ekdahl's house the guests begin to arrive. The dinner that follows is filled with unforgettable images: the candle-filled dining room, the copious feast set out on the tables, afterwards the guests and servants singing and dancing in procession through the house (an interesting counterpart to the danse macabre that concludes The Seventh Seal) while the children are being entertained by Uncle Carl's "fireworks show," which consists of him lowering his trousers and blowing out three candles in a candelabrum with a single fart. When the meal has ended, the children are sent to bed in the nursery, where they have a pillow fight with their young nursemaid. Later, after the lights are out, Alexander, unable to sleep, sets up and plays with his Christmas present, a magic lantern. After everyone else has gone to bed or gone home, Grandmother Ekdahl and her friend Isak stay up drinking cognac and reminiscing, during which she is stricken by a fit of melancholia and broods on the passing of time. "This happy, splendid life is over," she tells Isak, "and this horrible, dirty life engulfs us."

Bergman seems to have rolled all of life into this one meal: youth and old age, joy and sadness, reality and imagination, poverty (the chronically debt-ridden Uncle Carl) and prosperity (Oscar's financial success with the theater), sex (horny Uncle Gustav Adolf bedding the voluptuous nursemaid Maj) and death (Oscar, Alexander's father, is already showing signs of the fatigue and illness that will soon kill him.)

•The Dead, John Huston (1987). Based on the short story by James Joyce, probably the greatest work of short fiction in the English language, this movie takes place almost entirely during one meal, a dinner given by three sisters ("the three Graces of Dublin") to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. This is last day of the well-known twelve days of Christmas and in the Christian religion is observed to mark the adoration of the Magi and the presentation of their gifts to the Christ child. The dinner tells the viewer everything about an extended middle-class Dublin family, especially Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston).

But the real revelation—Gabriel's own epiphany—takes place after the meal, during the carriage ride home, just as Gabriel, emboldened by the intensely emotional mood of the dinner they have attended, is about to declare to his wife his love for her. Before he can speak, Gretta, also deeply moved by the dinner experience, confesses her first youthful love and its tragic outcome and quietly falls asleep in the carriage. Gabriel realizes that her feelings for him can never be as strong as those for her dead first love, nor as strong as his own for her. The movie ends with the "Snow is falling" voice-over read verbatim from the story, one of the most hauntingly melancholic passages in all literature, and equally moving here as the finale of the movie and of the long career of its director, John Huston.