STILL SHINING
Bjorkman crafts an intimate look at Ingrid Bergman’s life
Some stars shine on, even after they wink out. Ingrid Bergman is such a figure. Gone for almost 34 years — she’d have turned 100 last summer — Bergman’s presence on the screen remains so vital, it’s hard to imagine she’s already part of cinema’s ancient history.
Her countryman Stig Bjorkman, a film critic as well as a filmmaker, has crafted a beautiful portrait of the artist’s life. Though the credits list two other co-writers, the bulk of the material flows from Bergman’s own hand, culled from her numerous diaries and letters, and often illustrated with her home movies.
We meet her as a child, already documenting her life and anxious to be someone more than she is. Having found success in films in her native Sweden, she came to America at the invitation of David O. Selznick to star in Intermezzo: A Love Story, a 1939 English-language remake of her 1936 Swedish film.
A screen test shows the 24-year-old glancing at the camera and then away, alternately innocent and smouldering.
It’s hard to imagine Bergman doing anything other than acting. Briefly between jobs in the early 1940s, she laments: “Only half of me is alive.” But soon after those words were written she found work in Casablanca, Gaslight (her first Oscar), The Bells of St. Mary’s (another nomination), Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and more.
Motherhood took a definite back seat to her career and even her love life.
Thrice married, she bore four children: Pia Lindstrom, from her first marriage; and Roberto, Isotta and Isabella Rossellini, from her second marriage to director Roberto Rossellini.
The children feature prominently in the film, mostly agreeing with their mother’s assertion that she was more friend than parent.
Mind you, in Bergman’s words, this sounds more like a justification; for the children it was a loss.
But they all seem to have made peace with the fact that she was what she was. And the film does a respectable job of keeping psychoanalysis to a minimum, despite having ample material. Bergman’s two siblings died in infancy, and she lost both her parents before she was 15.
Also in the make-of-this-what-you-will category was her passion for the character of Joan of Arc, which she played numerous times on stage and screen. (Her son recalls the traumatizing effect of seeing his mother burnt at the end of a performance.)
Doubtless this role provided fuel for politicians who tried to keep the scandalous star out of America: “Out of Ingrid Bergman’s ashes will come a better Hollywood,” said one.
It’s difficult to encompass such a complicated life in less than two hours, but Bjorkman encapsulates it nicely. He’s aided by Alicia Vikander as the voice of Bergman’s prose — finally, a role where the Swedish actress gets to use her own accent — which can be frank and even a touch haughty, but also touchingly humble and uncertain.
Writing in her diary in 1935, Bergman talks about her already burgeoning film career in Sweden.
“There’s a rumour that I’m the greatest talent around,” she says, “My classmates have no work, and the studios are fighting for me ... I hope I don’t disappoint them.”