Mellowed Bergman

Ingmar Bergman is no longer making films about God and the devil, or expressionistic jousts between man and the unknown. A new Bergman movie is apt to seem more like a simple cry for human understanding. Mellower than he used to be, Bergman at the same time is perhaps even more prolific, and within the next few months his new concern with people will be seen not only in a new film, but on the stage, on television and in print.

This week The New Yorker is publishing the 12,000-word scenario written by Bergman for his latest movie, Whisperings and Cries, which will be released in the U.S. in a month or so. "It reads like a long piece of fiction," says Editor William Shawn. "It has all his different kinds of images, understanding of people, psychology, and seriousness." The scenario began as a picture in the director's head--"four women with white dresses in a red room"--and over a year or so it slowly developed into a convoluted story of three sisters and their servant girl living in an isolated 19th century manor house.

Don't Ask Why. Liv Ullmann plays the selfish and sensual youngest sister and Ingrid Thulin the oldest, who has imprisoned her feelings in walls of ice. Harriet Andersson is the sister who dies of cancer, quite visibly and painfully on the screen. Not only are the interiors of all the rooms red, but whole scenes are periodically suffused in crimson hues. "Don't ask me why it's to be that way, because I can't tell you," Bergman writes in his screenplay. "The bluntest and also most tenable [explanation] is probably that the whole thing is internal, and ever since childhood I have imagined the soul to be a damp membrane in varying shades of red."

The different shades of red may also stand for the psychological subtleties of women, which Bergman likes to explore with loving but clinical precision. He tended to sentimentalize and romanticize women, he says, until he became close to his mother in the months before her death two years ago. Only through intimate talks with her did he learn that she had been smothered in her role as the wife of a Lutheran minister. He also came to understand "the division of sex roles in the middle-class home--the woman's martyrdom, the man's authority. This pattern of sweeping things under the rug, never quarreling, never talking things out, smothering unpleasantness."

His new explorations of middle-class marriage will be shown on both Swedish and American television. Next month CBS Playhouse 90 will tape The Lie, a 1 1/2-hour Bergman script about the emotions that seethe under the surface of domestic amenities; and Swedish TV next spring will show his most ambitious project so far in terms of length, a six-part series entitled Scenes Out of a Marriage. Starring Ullmann, the series unmasks a seemingly perfect marriage. "The theme is how the bourgeois ideology of 'security' corrupts people's emotional lives," says Bergman. "It's a sort of he-and-she dialogue."

Dialogues. At 54, Bergman has had a lot of experience with such dialogues in several long-term relationships, including one with Ullmann, by whom he had a daughter, Linn, now six. He has also been married five times. A year ago, he took his present wife from just the sort of secure household he depicts. When she went to live with Bergman, she was the Countess Ingrid von Rosen, wife of the foster son of Sweden's Prince Carl and the mother of four teen-age children. "He made me feel that I was important," says Ingrid, 41, explaining why she left her husband for Bergman. "He listened to me. He gave me a feeling that what I said mattered. I grew within myself."

Following the taping of the TV series, which has just been completed, Bergman will turn to directing Strindberg's Ghost Sonata for Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater. "Moviemaking is my lover," he says, "but I am married to the theater." Bergman's timetable seldom varies: he writes a new screenplay each spring, films it in the fall, directs in the theater in the winter. The only variation in his schedule this winter may be a quick incognito trip to New York--his first--to see Hal Prince's Broadway musical A Little Night Music, which will be an adaptation of Bergman's film comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night.

Disliking travel, unfamiliar faces, drinking, smoking, and big parties, Bergman has set up his house and studio on the desolate, windswept Baltic island of Faroe, one of the most remote spots in Europe. Despite the three-hour trip from Stockholm--made in stages by plane, boat and car--and chilly, primitive working conditions, his "family," usually the same group of six or so fine actors and technicians, loves to work with him. Part of the reason is that these days, as he himself jokingly admits, he can be regarded as "a downright nice guy." Once famous for his violent, chair-throwing temper, Bergman says, "it has slowly but surely dawned on me that everything functions just as well without outbursts of fury." He has lost none of his passion for his work despite having made 33 movies since he began filming in 1945. "I'm still just as hungry for it," he says. "I wake up with the same excitement every day."

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