From the Life of the Marionettes

Bergman's working with a very restricted palette here, as he did with The Rite or Winter Light. The romantic, funny touches you expect from him are missing. Peter's mind is crumbling; he's a modern Othello obsessed with his wife's fidelity amid the tasteful furniture of their elegant home. All the action is seen through the distorting lens of Peter's madness. Why would his wife say, in front of strangers, that she has to get drunk to steady her nerves at her mother-in-law's place? This is the disturbed mind at work.

The acting is fine. Robert Atzorn and Walter Schmidinger do very well as, essentially, two sides of the same coin (the stodgy businessman and the gay fashion designer). Christina Buchegger is wonderful as Katharina, the wife; her attempts to win out over Peter's psychosis give the film what drama it has.

A complex dissection of a murder and a murderer, told by jumping back and forth in time, before and after the event, A deeply disturbing portrait of a man and a society so cut off from feeling that violence seems almost inevitable.

While more divided in public reaction then some of Bergman's most beloved works, I think this edgy, bold, uncomfortable film ranks close to some of his best work. While there are moments of pretension, there's also a lot of human and psychological complexity (and wonderful acting) in this bleak exploration of how near murder and madness lie to any of us.

Bergman made this film in Germany, while in exile from Sweden for tax-related reasons. It's a dark and disturbing psychological portrait of a man, Peter, who murders a prostitute in the opening scene. The film moves back and forth in time, using title cards to establish the setting in time, trying to explain Peter's troubles. It's reminiscent of Scenes from a Marriage, as Peter has problems relating to his wife, Katarina. A few weeks before the murder, he started having fantasies and dreams about murdering her. The prologue, depicting the murder (or, more precisely, the moments before the murder) and the epilogue (Peter in prison) are filmed in color, but everything else is in black and white. The composition is generally not showy, but there is an amazingly filmed dream sequence, the film's centerpiece. The script is generally brilliant, very observant. The only thing I felt was a little underdeveloped was the homosexual character, Tim, and Peter's supposed latent homosexuality, which the psychoanalyst character describes near the end. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that material. 9/10.

Bergman was on top form writing this piece - there's lots to think about. What motivates a respectable man, whose mental state indicates only a small risk of self-harm, to undertake such a violent and frenzied crime? Do the ulterior motives and actions of those around him (wife, shrink, wife's business partner...)deliberately or unwittingly trigger the crime - or indeed are those sub-plots entirely incidental to the central event? These questions are not answered - they are raised and illuminated.

This is not Bergman's greatest piece of cinema - the mixture of documentary, drama and flashback can be a little disorienting - but the argument of the film drives on relentlessly and it is compulsive watching. Well worth seeing.

A short comment - enjoyed this and it is up to the usual Bergmann standards. As with many of his other films sticking with some of the difficult opening scenes rewards the viewer later with a thought provoking account of one man's depression leading to violence and murder. In many ways Bergman is the jacques costeau of the film world, exploring the deep seas and bringing up to the surface what lies below!