FILM: NEW BERGMAN WORK, ‘LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES’

By JANET MASLIN

Published: June 30, 1981

THE characters in Ingmar Bergman’s bracingly angry ”From the Life of the Marionettes” aren’t like the people in other Bergman films. They’re just as talkative, but much less articulate or analytical. They’re pettier and more quarrelsome. They tend to accept cliched, unimaginative explanations of their troubles, and to underestimate the importance of their feelings – ”You show such little respect for your own fear,” one tells another. They make no progress, which is part of why the film has a circular structure. They are almost beyond hope.

And yet around such blank, lost characters, Mr. Bergman has fashioned his most forceful film in a long while. ”From the Life of the Marionettes” isn’t a delicate work, or even an especially clear one, but its violence and bitterness create an undeniable urgency. As played by an excellent cast of German actors, the film reverberates with a rage it never entirely accounts for. The best portions of it have the unexplained, unsettling power of a bad dream.

”From the Life of the Marionettes,” which opens today at the Coronet, is about Peter Egerman and his wife Katarina, who so disturbs Peter that he has found himself wishing he could kill her – and fearing that he may. Peter and Katarina were incidental characters in ”Scenes From a Marriage,” dinner guests who had a quarrel at Johan and Marianne’s house, and even now they continue to fight. Katarina mocks and intimidates Peter. She also drinks too much and embarrasses him in public. Peter plays the same game, for reasons he can only phrase sarcastically. ”Isn’t there an idiotic notion that some poor fools love their fights, their mutual humiliations?” he asks. ”That it’s supposed to be some exquisite form of contact?” For Peter and Katarina, this battling is at once the most dreadful part of their lives and the only part that’s real.

Peter doesn’t kill Katarina; as the film begins, he kills another woman, a prostitute who looks like his wife and is named Katarina too. In a brilliant opening sequence, filmed in color (the rest of the film, except for its very last moments, is in black and white), Mr. Bergman progresses from a brief, almost fond-looking exchange between Peter and the prostitute to the murder, suggesting that it may be the woman’s apparent friendliness that has sealed her fate. After this, the film moves back and forth in time, presenting key moments in Peter’s decline and watching as interrogators interview those who knew him.

These scenes are separate from one another, more like vignettes than pieces of a puzzle. They are ordered according to a sly scheme. A character will end one scene with a statement that the next scene reveals to be a lie. Or someone, behaving with apparent forthrightness in one episode, will reveal an uglier motive in the next. Through this process, everyone in the film is gradually undone. Though Peter’s crime is never seen as a reasonable or even understandable response to his predicament, his actions fall into place beside the duplicity and deviousness of everyone else in the story.

”From the Life of the Marionettes” is daring in that it forces Peter to an extreme act it never fully accounts for, an act of more dramatic value than plausibility. Peter’s killing of the prostitute is at once wild and facile, and so are the film’s easier ironies (that Peter’s wife and mother look very much alike, for instance. Or that the prostitute has more humanity than anyone else in the story). But for all its intensity, the film is incomplete somehow, voicing its bitterness and outrage, yet never passing beyond the stage of a complaint. The long, narrative passages spoken by characters so illequipped to understand their feelings prove to be rambling, even unclear, as often as they are touching.

Mr. Bergman’s cast of German actors performs admirably, capturing both the pain and the limitations of the people they play. Christine Buchegger is particularly good as Katarina and Robert Atzorn brings Peter’s grief to life. Martin Benrath, in the role of a sleazy psychiatrist, and Walter Schmidinger, playing a stereotypically sad homosexual, are eerily effective. Sven Nykvist’s cinematography makes especially good use of the blinding white light of the film’s dream sequences, a whiteness that only turns real at the moment of the murder. Peter asks the prostitute to turn off the fluorescent lights in the club where she works, but she forgets, or doesn’t hear him. In any case, by the time Peter finds himself in the same brightly lit atmosphere of his most terrible dreams, it’s too late. Wanton Murder FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES, directed and written by Ingmar Bergman; in German with English subtitles; director of photography, Sven Nykvist; edited by Petra Von Oelffen; music by Rolf Wilhelm; executive producers, Lord Grade and Martin Starger; an ITC Entertainment Release; distributed by Associated Film Distribution. At the Coronet, Third Avenue and 59th Street. Running time: 104 minutes. This film is rated R. Peter Egerman ………………………Robert Atzorn Katarina ……………………..Christine Buchegger Mogens Jensen ……………………..Martin Benrath Ka ………………………………….Rita Russek Cordelia Egerman …………………….Lola Muethel Tim …………………………..Walter Schmidinger Arthur Brenner ……………………..Heinz Bennent Nurse ………………………………..Ruth Olafs Interrogator ……………………Karl Heinz Pelser Secretary ……………………………..Gaby Dohm Doorman ……………………………..Toni Berger

30 luglio 2007 moriva I. Bergman film scelto : da un mondo di marionette ; Bergman i post

FILM: NEW BERGMAN WORK, ‘LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES’

By JANET MASLIN

Published: June 30, 1981

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