The Passion of Anna

Rating:
Summary: An uneven transitional effort
Review: "The Passion of Anna" forms a bridge between Bergman's great "couples battling adversity" films of the mid-1960s (insanity in "Hour of the Wolf"; war in "Shame") and the more intimate, personal struggles of "Cries and Whispers" and "Scenes from a Marriage." Largely due to its nature as a transitional film, "Passion" often lacks focus. It can't seem to make up its mind whether it's about relationships or external hardships, and in trying to deal with both areas, the film ultimately covers neither one especially well. The subplot with Bibi Andersson feels undeveloped, as if Bergman had planned to follow through with something else but never got around to it.

Despite the thematic problems, "The Passion of Anna" has much to recommend it. Ullmann and von Sydow are, as always, outstanding, and it is interesting to see how they handle their cryptic roles. All Bergman fans will want to see this intermittently-inspired film; others should approach with some caution.

Rating:
Summary: Apocalyptic Bergman.
Review: 'The Passion of Anna' sometimes feels like a compendium of Bergman films, such as 'The Seventh Seal' (Max Von Sydow struggling to find meaning in an apocalyptic environment), 'Persona' (Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson as two women suffering on a remote island) and 'Hour of the Wolf' (Von Sydow, living with Ullmann on a remote island, tempted by sophisticated strangers led by Erland Josephson).

But though the film deals with the many of those films' themes - emotional violence, power mind-games, dissatisfaction, ennui, exile - it somehow seems lighter, less like spending two hours on a (nerve) rack. This may be because though the title refers to two kinds of passion - an overwhelming love for or interest in something, and a journey of trials and sufferings leading to some kind of redemption - it features a hero who is removed from either.

A gruesome mystery element soon intrudes, as an unknown figure starts slaughtering all the animals on the island. This element performs at least two functions - by asking the question, who is this madman, it forces us to look more closely at our characters; and it creates an apocalyptic feel that is an appropriate backdrop to the characters' mental deterioraton or fatigue, while also suggesting a wider, largely unseen social framework against which these isolated figures exist.

It also contributes to the film's bleak colour scheme - though in colour, the film's winter setting is all brown and grey, with big black bare trees, swathes of mud and stone, dirty smudges of snow. This has obvious symbolic value - just as we first meet Von Sydow repairing his roof, as if trying to paper the cracks in his mind; so we see him alone, sometimes drunk, in this huge, empty landscape, peopled only by dead animals, elusive madmen and an unseen mob.

As is typical with Bergman, the film is full of narrative games or interruptions, such as the actors commenting on their roles, trying to encapsulate coherence while their director proliferates the unknown; and Ullmann's monochrome nightmare, increasing the sense of medieval plague, is a figure for a malaise much closer to home.

Rating:
Summary: A movie full of 'Passion'.
Review: After having seen Woody Allen's INTERIORS I was so impressed by the direction. I found out that Allen was paying homage to Bergman and at the time I was just finding out about all sorts of different movies, I was 14 at the time so this was so amazing to me and still is. Afterwards I sought out movies by Bergman but I was always a little afraid of being dissappointed (I had recorded THE SEVENTH SEAL on TV but I thought I ought to take baby steps in terms of getting to know Bergman so I did not see it). But finally I decided to start with THE PASSION OF ANNA and now every week I rent at least two Bergman movies from my library. The direction is genius! I love the way Bergman doesn't try to hype up events. He just lets everything unravel in a natural way. Whenever someone in this movie is saying something regarding their emotional state or past experiences, etc. Bergman lets their emotions shine through and he presents us with intimate close ups of their faces so that we can observe every bit of the emotions that the character is going through. Other directors prefer to use music and other methods which I am not condemning, I actually like some of the other methods that other directors use but I had never seen a movie in which the director let everything happen so naturally, as if it weren't even a movie but a documentery though the look of the movie is not realistic, it looks like a movie but it doesn't feel like one. Bergman gives us a stark and compelling movie about these 4 people who are going through the motions and how they affect each other's lives. Max von Sydow plays a widower who lives a very mechanical life until he gets in involved in the lives of three other people and they are played by Bibi Anderson, Erland Josephson and finally Liv Ullmann as Anna. von Sydow and Ullmann I thought were particularly great. It's hard for an actor to play a man who is emotionally hollow to a certain degree but von Sydow does it perfectly. Ullmann plays a woman who is still suffering after effects of the deaths of her husband and child and who ends up looking for solace in von Sydow's character. She shows great measure of desperation and sadness in her performance without being showy. And the cinematography is very beautiful if a bit depressing to those who hate gray skies. And the lack of music gives it a very strange feeling like I mentioned before. And Bergman uses an interesting method of showing short interviews with each of the four actors with them discussing their characters. I found this to be a bit daring because Bergman ran the risk of breaking the suspension of disbelief of the audience but personally I felt it just made me go deeper into their lives and selves. I can see why Woody Allen idolizes this guy.

Rating:
Summary: An overlooked gem worth seeking out
Review: Bergman's "Passion of Anna" (more accurately and originally titled "A Passion") is an overlooked gem. One of Bergman and Nykvist's first forays into color, the film continues the themes explored in "Persona," "Hour of the Wolf" and "Shame" immediately before. Von Sydow's Andreas Winkelman is a man spiritually adrift in his bleak island landscape. By chance he meets Anna (Liv Ullmann), his morally adrift match, and her friends (played by Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson). Each of these people has secrets; some that will be revealed--intentionally or not--through mistakenly left letters, overheard telephone conversations and passed-on heresay. Anna's story about her loving husband's misfortune--it turns out--may have, in fact, been at her hand. Meanwhile, a maniac is loose on the island, torturing and killing animals. Could it be one of the four characters in our story? As always, the acting is top-notch. Ullmann, for instance, telegraphs Anna's self-deluding lies through the blushing Nykvist's camera masterfully captures in close-up. The ending (which won't ruin the movie by revealing) is an ingenius construction. Von Sydow's Andreas--completely stripped of his pride and character paces back and forth within the bleak terrain of the camera's frame. Bergman/Nykvist simultaneously zooms in slowly while pulling back optically at the same rate. The result is a "flattening" of the image in which Andreas literally disolves into the grain of the film. Bleak... but brilliant. I await this film's release on DVD!

Rating:
Summary: Aka A passion
Review: Filmed on writer director's brooding island Faro in the Baltic Sea where Bergman built his house and resides, this film carries the weight of his latter films. Perhaps making Persona in 1967 changed something in Bergman, because it seems that all the films he made after, are without humour. You'd be hard to find any laughs in The Touch, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, Face to Face, The Serpent's Egg, Autumn Sonata, From the Life of the Marionettes, or After the Rehearsal (Fanny and Alexander was a return to form). For ¾ of the it's running time, Anna is a fascinating narrative, though not without it's flaws, but then Bergman bogs down Max von Sydow in a long speech about the "humiliation of freedom", just after we barely survived Liv Ullmann's one take unrelenting close-up description of a car accident, and we begin to despise Bergman for the techniques that he was applauded for. It's a huge relief, unintentionally hilarious, and rather puzzling when von Sydow and Ullmann have a knock down drag out physical fight, and our loyalties are divided since they've both been so tiresome. The narrative is confusing. The title indicates that it is the Ullmann character who is the protagonist, and our expectations are set when the von Sydow's hermit life is interrupted by her entrance, and he chances upon a letter about her which predict "complications which will bring on terrible mental disturbances causing physical and psychical acts of violence". It's not that Bergman hasn't presented stories with violence in the past - The Virgin Spring features rape and murder - but Persona's reliance on scrutinising closeups, as brilliant as the use of them was, was exhausting. However Ullmann's relationship with von Sydow suddenly jumps time from being with him at a party held by Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson, to living with him, with no progression. Instead we get Andersson's affair, and a subplot about the local killing of animals. This not to say that these events are less interesting, but simply meandering, and perhaps Bergman's greater interest in von Sydow is representative of his own agenda. Bergman prefers to live alone, having moved beyond the need for human companionship, and now we have to learn this via von Sydow. The film is full of touches - the ticking clock, the hanging of a puppy and the hanging toybear in a car, a moth trapped behind a closed window, the killing of a bird that has injured itself at the door, the famous TV coverage of the execution in a Saigon street during the Tet offensive (Persona used similar Vietnam TV footage), von Sydow's daydream of presumably his wife and their sex, and Ullmann's dream of alienation lit like concentration camp footage. Bergman extends the Persona film-within-a-film style by anonymous interviews with the actors on their characters, and provides some tension with the editing of Ullmann driving and the cuts to the view of the speeding car. Of the actors, Andersson again presents a study in vulnerability, in a role we can't imagine Ullmann playing, Ullmann more effective when having hysterics off-camera, and von Sydow is amusing when roaring drunk.

Rating:
Summary: Genius at work...
Review: I am amongst those Bergman fans who prefer his post-Persona work best. I find many of his late 40's-50's films too calculated & highly pretentious (especially films like The Silence & Winter Light). One of the best Bergman films of the 70's

Rating:
Summary: Genius at work...
Review: I am amongst those Bergman fans who prefer his post-Persona work best. I find many of his late 40's-50's films too calculated & highly pretentious (especially films like The Silence & Winter Light). One of the best Bergman films of the 70's

Rating:
Summary: WONDERFUL! A GREAT INQUIRY ON THE HUMAN CONDITION!
Review: People who aren't "turned off" & disgusted by the current state of the world (enviromentally, politically, culturally, sociologically, etc.) will immediately understand this film and appreciate its beauty! Upon the first time seeing it, I felt it was unfocused and confused. The second time, when it occured to me that these people were living in front of the backdrop of something emotionally emasculating (random slaughtering, War, whatever you want to supplement), I realized what a masterpiece this film is. That uneasy feeling that life is unraveling all around you, that human beings are destroying each other, even though you don't directly see it...Bergman captures that feeling beautifully.

The interviews in the film bothered me for a while, but then I started to view them (and commend Bergman's brillance) as Brechtian distancing effects, as if Bergman is saying: "yes, live vicariously through these people, but after all they're just characters representing something, but they are NOT these people, so what???". Fantastic!

If you don't already own this and you love Bergman, what's wrong with you???

Rating:
Summary: WONDERFUL! A GREAT INQUIRY ON THE HUMAN CONDITION!
Review: People who aren't "turned off" & disgusted by the current state of the world (enviromentally, politically, culturally, sociologically, etc.) will immediately understand this film and appreciate its beauty! Upon the first time seeing it, I felt it was unfocused and confused. The second time, when it occured to me that these people were living in front of the backdrop of something emotionally emasculating (random slaughtering, War, whatever you want to supplement), I realized what a masterpiece this film is. That uneasy feeling that life is unraveling all around you, that human beings are destroying each other, even though you don't directly see it...Bergman captures that feeling beautifully.

The interviews in the film bothered me for a while, but then I started to view them (and commend Bergman's brillance) as Brechtian distancing effects, as if Bergman is saying: "yes, live vicariously through these people, but after all they're just characters representing something, but they are NOT these people, so what???". Fantastic!

If you don't already own this and you love Bergman, what's wrong with you???

Rating:
Summary: Eros and Thanatos
Review: This is one of the very few films that I came out of the theater crawling *under* the carpet... And I still find it disturbing - and at the same time or perhaps exactly because enlightening. Many of Bergman's films of that time dealt with the inherent self-destructiveness of the "human condition"; but most of them also had a plot element that involved an external destructive force: war (The Seventh Seal, Shame), the proximity of death (Wild Strawberries) and so on. Even Hour of the Wolf, the one that comes closest to Passion, has the "wolves" - the coterie that seduces Max von Sidow's character into reliving, facing, and ultimately succumbing to, his inner demons (by the way, make sure that your version of Hour of the Wolf includes the posface, "look, this is a movie, and we just wrapped it up, it's not real, you see, these people are just characters in a movie played by 'normal' people - but the demons will stay with you, cause they're not really ours, they're your own").

Not so Passion. Here, there is no outward force pushing these people - these "normal", whatever their personal demons, people - towards inescapable destruction. There is the wanton, unresolved slaughter of animals; but this doesn't touch the characters, no more than the everyday "slaughter of the lambs" that surrounds much of our lives does us except to at most evoke a vague disquiet, let alone drive them. They're doomed; always were. Nothing can save them. Not love, or the forlorn illusion of, not a bourgeois life surrounded by creature comforts, not even outburts of personal violence. There is simply no redemption.

For the "passion" is not "a" passion, but *the* passion, the passion that drives us all, and indeed all life: the endless collision and collusion between Life and Death, that sets down the boundaries within which we, like Von Sydow's character at the film's closing, must forever pace back and forth.