Not Coming to a Theater Near You

An-Magritt / Norway / 1969

Sandwiched between two of Bergman’s great late-60’s chamber pieces, An-Magritt is easily overlooked and is rarely screened in the U.S. But it is at least notable for bringing together two generations of Scandinavian cinema with three of its most central figures: the Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Norwegian actress (and later director) Liv Ullmann, and the most important of mid-century Norwegian directors, Arne Skouen, whose last film this is.

But even with the contribution of two key members of Bergman’s team, the film is quite different from the Swedish director’s work. Set in the rural, Danish-ruled Norway in an unspecified period of the Middle Ages, the film’s title character struggles under the weight of class inequities and rigid religious code, laboring in the collection of coal for the local chamberlain and struggling to keep from starving or freezing to death. Nykvist’s work here is distinct from that of his films with his great Swedish collaborator, taking in the often brutal winter landscape that envelopes the film’s characters rather than zooming in to incisive closeups of their inner thoughts. And while the film utilizes the indeterminate vastness of this landscape to suggest the many imperceptible forces, political and religious, that guide the lives of An-Magritt and her fellow laborers, its effects are always social, rather than psychological as in Bergman.

Ullmann’s performance is characteristically sympathetic and involving, balancing (as she does often in Bergman’s films) a watchful vulnerability with an occasionally childlike defiance and determination. This is not far from her roles in Shame and The Passion of Anna bookend this film, but the key difference is Skouen’s emphasis on An-Magritt’s pluck and resourcefulness. Bergman, on the other hand, uses Ullmann’s seeming vulnerability as a mask for more sinister, more hateful attributes.

of this is perhaps to say that Skouen’s is simply the more old-fashioned film, more concerned with enveloping the audience in a remote and anthropologically exotic context than plumbing emotional depths or probing relationships and metaphysical quandaries. This is not to point up a deficiency in Skouen’s film, as he achieves his goal quite equitably: approaching, but ultimately resisting the varieties of romanticism and miserablism that usually serve to prove that those long-ago times were either more essential or more unbearably horrible than our own. An-Magritt — convincingly acted, beautifully shot, well constructed, and rather unexpectedly funny as it is — manages to draw us into this world of work, love, hardship, religion, and hope in a way that makes it seem inhabitable and plausible, if not the least bit cozy.

And true to that wonderfully ardent, colloquial Scandinavian socialism, there is even a strangely successful bit of unionizing at the end, as the laborers demand fair tariffs for their work — and get it.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Norsk Film 35mm print
13 Jan 2007 2:43 PM | Submit Comment