The Passion of Anna

The filming of The Passion of Anna took forty-five days and was quite an ordeal. The screenplay had been written in a white heat. It was more a description of a series of moods than a traditional, dramatic film sequence.
--Ingmar Bergman

I wish I'd run across this quotation by Bergman before I saw his film, The Passion of Anna (1969), last night.  The film is the fifth in this season's Bergman series at the Seattle Art Museum.  Many critics consider it the third in a trilogy of films, all filmed on the island of Fårö, which also include Hour of the Wolf and Shame.  SAM has shown the three films consecutively, in sequence.

The film differs from its two predecessors, first of all, by being filmed in color.  Bergman attempted, he has said, to film a black and white film in color, with various hues coded to convey various emotions.  He was unhappy with the result, discovering that the existing color technology made it difficult or impossible to obtain the results he hoped for.  But the colors do have a rather attractive washed-out quality.

The film also differs from Wolf and Shame in the weakness, intentional or otherwise, of its plot.  I found myself often confused.  I suspect that a number of scenes were flashbacks to past events, but I would have to view the film again -- especially the first half -- to see if my suspicion is correct.  Wikipedia presents a very straight-forward account of the plot, such as it is, which seemed less straight-forward to me during my viewing.

The moods that Bergman wishes to present -- in preference to conventional plot -- are those of loneliness, inability to connect with others, deception of oneself and thus of others as well, and the futility of life as lived by most middle-aged adults..

The four main characters are Andreas (Max von Sydow), a reclusive but friendly man living alone, surrounded by books; Elis, an ironic, successful, but self-deprecating architect who has no belief in his work; Eva, his wife; and Anna (Liv Ullmann), a friend living with Elis and Eva.

Anna claims to believe in openness, trust, and truthfulness.  She idolizes her marriage to a husband who, together with their child, died in an automobile accident.  But we learn that the marriage had been a disaster, a fact that Anna cannot face because it doesn't fit with her ideology.  After a brief affair with Eva, Andreas enters a more serious relationship with Anna -- knowing from the outset that Anna is both deceived and deceptive about her former marriage.

No one is happy, of course.  Andreas finally tells Anna, while driving with her, that neither of them loves the other, and that he longs to be alone again.    She lets him out of the car, and -- apparently as a metaphor for his conflicting desires for connection and independence -- he paces back and forth on the road, unable to decide which direction to walk, as the film ends.

As a subplot, some unknown person on the island is killing animals with great cruelty.  An innocent man is blamed for it, and ultimately commits suicide.  This subplot apparently expresses a strong Bergman conviction.

My philosophy (even today) is that there exists an evil – and humans are the only animals to possess it. An evil that is irrational and not bound by law. Cosmic. Causeless. Nothing frightens people more than incomprehensible, unexplainable evil.

This is all very well, but I'm not sure the average movie-goer -- e.g., myself -- understands how this subplot, this philosophy, has much to do with the rest of the film.  None of the four main characters seems to represent capital E "evil."  They are unhappy, they hurt each other without really meaning to, they consider their lives meaningless.  But evil?  The concept of "irrational evil" came alive far more convincingly in the two earlier films of the trilogy.

Interesting film in some respects, with the usual excellent acting and cinematography, but a film that left me rather unsatisfied.