THE BEST INTENTIONS
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
THE BEST INTENTIONS is a Swedish film directed by Bille August, from a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman. It stars Pernilla August, Samuel Froler, Max Von Sydow, Ghita Norby. Unrated. Swedish with English subtitles.
THE BEST INTENTIONS examines the subject of love. It is Ingmar Bergman's story about the courting and mating of his parents, Henrik and Anna Bergman. It is also about the love of the son for his parents. And as it turned out, the love between Bille August and Pernilla Ostergren August, who married and had a child during the filming of THE BEST INTENTIONS. (At one point in the story, Henrik lifts up Anna's shift to reveal her swollen abdomen--a beautiful and shocking moment because it is so clearly not a prosthetic. It is also shocking that the story says so clearly that love is a matter of forgiveness. Throughout the film, one character after another says, "Forgive me" or "I can never forgive you" or finally "How can we ever forgive each other?" I freely admit I don't spend a lot of time thinking about love in the abstract so maybe I am the last person on the planet to whom this is going to be an amazing insight, but it comes close to being an epiphany for me, one for which I am greatful in the extreme to Messrs August and Bergman.
Their collaboration has produced a beautiful, thoughtful film, intense, involving, complex in its characterizations. They actually produced two products, a six-hour version for Swedish television and the three-hour theatrical release. The theatrical version has already earned two Palmes d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (Best Picture and Best Actress), and if it doesn't get the Best Foreign Film at the Oscars I'll be mightily surprised. Certainly, they've managed to make the three hours move along briskly without producing a brisk movie. It is only at the very end, when perhaps I was just plain exhausted by the emotional intensities of Henrik, Anna, and all their kin, that I became aware of the length of the film. The pacing is certainly slow and deliberate, with painterly shots of the changing Swedish landscapes and long, long moments of merely looking at one or two characters, of looking into their eyes, of seeing their pain, their conflicts, their love. The cinematographer was Jorgen Persson, who has captured the thin, soft light of the North that so perfectly reflects the clouded-over emotions of these restrained and passionate Swedes.
I read that Bergman, always the brilliant casting director, insisted on Pernilla August for the part of Anna, the bourgeois princess who defies her own, rock-solid mother to marry Henrik. As Pernilla Allwin, the actor had appeared as the maid in Bergman's final directorial effort, FANNY AND ALEXANDER, which dramatized his parents' later years. Bergman said, "Films begin with the human face" -- an insight lost on most Hollywood filmmakers, who appear to begin with a marketing concept. Bergman has filled his films with the likes of Bibi and Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullman, and Lena Olin. Pernilla August continues that tradition. Hers is not exactly a pretty face, but it is appealing and it is strong; in the beginning of the movie, the actress is visibly too old for her role -- this is going to be my only, and distinctly minor, cavil. She has something more important, and certainly more lasting, than the prettiness of youth; she has radiance, authority, energy, and great conviction. One reviewer quotes her as saying that August's slow pace let the actors achieve "the natural way of acting. . . . When a movie goes so fast, and you want to tell so much, then you take away the feelings from the audience. If you go slow, then the audience gets a chance to feel, to react."
Much less is written about Samuel Froler in the role of Henrik Bergman, the desperately poor, psychologically scarred divinity student who stubbornly crosses class lines to woo and wed Anna, even as he castigates himself for being a fool, for knowing that it will end in failure. During one of their marital crises, he cries out "I knew it all along that you'd leave me." It's a shame that the critics are tending to overlook Froler's performance because it is every bit as strong as Pernilla August's and he is an equally attractive screen presence. (Of course, Froler did not win a prize at Cannes as his co-star Pernilla August, and therefore doesn't attract the publicity; neither did he marry the director.) The mysticism, the unhealing hurts, the doubts, the love, the complexities of an extremely difficult but worthy human being, all these qualities come out in the wonderful job Froler turns in.
I cannot recommend THE BEST INTENTIONS too highly to you. You simply must see it and you must see it on the big screen.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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