INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘DREAMS’ “One has to say no at some point…”

 © 2020 by James Clark

 

    There are Bergman films that seem to be like ancient frescos, disappearing the moment they encounter our atmosphere. Thanks to a few devotees, such apparitions reappear by way of streaming and deep space, allowing us to confirm that everything he touched was very important.

The film, Dreams (1955), is not only a beautifully crafted and powerfully ironic evocation; but it is at the apex of a clutch of early 1950’s filmic gems with a strange and wonderful weave about actors, names, habits, habitats and humiliation. (The concentration there would spread out into many of the factors of later Bergman films.)

A brief description of this patterning can get us underway with the specifics being buoyed by a universal frenzy, however masked. Our protagonist, Susanne, owner of an haute couture concern, first comes to us as stressed and morose, putting much use to her opera-length cigarette holder aflame and asmoke. Less than a year before, in the film, A Lesson in Love (1954), we saw another frustrated Susanne. But whereas the latest to have that name is played by actress, Eva Dahlbeck, the Susanne of A Lesson in Love is played by actress, Yvonne Lombard, while Eva Dahlbeck portrays there, “Marianne,” a flakey, violent and patrician wife to one, “David,” a patrician gynecologist, played by Gunner Bjornstrand. In Dreams, Bjornstrand portrays Otto, a multi-millionaire, who picks up one of Susanne’s models, played by Harriet Andersson, a cynical, infantile gold-digger. In A Lesson in Love, Andersson portrays “Nix,” daughter of David, far more balanced than her parents. Andersson also portrays, Monika, the eponymous protagonist in Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953), who plays an unbalanced crocodile. Life going round and round; but going nowhere anytime soon.

  

Susanne’s studio/ salon, notwithstanding the nasty day in store, is, as always in Bergman, a treasure trove of eliciting forces to make a difference. Pratfalls, yes; but the roller coaster need only traces of lucidity in order to become a part of uniquely (but far from solitary) creative life. In a sort of roundup of that flow of multifaceted train wreck, the film, Dreams, becomes not only the well-known spree of dialectic, but the very rare appearance of surrealism. The film begins in darkness, with the sounds of a ticking clock; then it discloses the clock and pans over to someone’s hands gently pressing down upon a paper in liquid,  processing a photo in a dark room. A melancholy pop tune begins along with the result of the positive version of the image on the paper. The photo shows a woman’s lips, vividly textured, and with liquid highlights. A homage, of sorts, to Salvador Dali’s “Mae West Sofa.” We never categorically discover the artist of that film. But that Susanne’s coterie could come up with the surrealist eye-opener, constitutes a lovely fanfare.

In addition to the non-committal camera man (or camera woman), who probably regards his/ her colleagues as lacking vigor—the first full shot onscreen being ludicrous, with a grossly fat man and reminding us of the ringmaster in Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) with a complement of clowns—there is a striking, though subtle, moment of gossip and Susanne being too big to participate. The prelude of this interplay involves her suddenly being very unhappy about the flaccid set-up of a photo of Doris, the model about to spoil Otto’s tomorrow. She retreats to her darkened office amidst abstract photos hanging on a line (one of them rippling in a draft). Her door is ajar, and she hears Doris ridiculously blabbing about Susanne’s obsession with a businessman in Goteborg. (Being feeble-minded and, like Monika, a junkyard dog, she would, of course, attempt to tear down her betters.) Where many bosses would crush such a rat, Susanne remains silent and unique. Why? Let’s imagine the premise that she’s far more engaged with those photos than her bemusing career—bemusement being an exercise in knowing a very dangerous and extremely common enemy. “It was pretty hot and went on for a while. It lasted a whole year! But then it ended, just like that… He was married, see… Susanne went mad. She still loves him! She visits Goteborg a lot. They say she runs around spying on his house.” As it happens, Susanne  and Doris are about to visit that cosmopolitan and intellectual (and decorative) city, to shoot the rest of the collection. “We’re travelling tonight.”

    Susanne and Doris take an evening train; and even before they settle into their compartment things happen. We see the lights of their locomotive already in play. In fact those lights, shown coming along way back on the tracks, describe the vertices of a triangle, with the bases at each side and a third above. Good luck, girls, great fortune is yours—awaiting your courage! Another angle of the trip shows the parallel tracks carrying the adventurers at a breathtaking clip. Business is business. But motion is magic, for those who really venture! At a corridor giving a rather raw sense of the procedure, Susanne exposes herself to  elements more germane to her future than a buffo business trip. A pan toward her back shows a black void, and she peers into it. Then she looks around at dim lights and curtains defining the customers. The sway of the curtains moves her somewhat. We then find her in even more difficult light, with pin-prick star-light and the rain-soaked window. A pan to close-up revs up a grinding of the tracks. She looks down in fear, and then confronts us. Cut to a graphic on an entry door, asking, “Is the door secured.?” And a figure completes the transaction, by way of falling out to his death into space (shallow or deep). Cut to the slick tracks and their twists and turns. In disclosing that passage, we have the three lights, but the central one is far larger than before, as if the lingering she has withstood were enough for a small celebration. Soon the uncanny fails to find traction, and she pulls down the blind. (In A Lesson in Love, Eva Dahlbeck’s Marianne and Gunner Bjornstrand’s David play games of coquetry in a train compartment, pertaining to the window blind.) Susanne has become haunted by the depicted plunge to death. She gasps for breath and places her hand over her face. Suddenly, she shakes her head in panic and cries out. A shrill whistle, from the train, and she’s close to collapse. In her twisting about she inadvertently had opened the window, and her face and head became soaked, a condition having brought to her some composure. The lamps and the curtains become mundane. The track shifts to another locale. Two stacked lights are all we see. Susanne is drained of gusto for the voyage. She returns to the hot button register of her reputation: “Dear God, let me see him… Let me see him, for just one moment! I just want to touch him. I won’t say anything. I won’t cry. God, I must see him… I must, I must…” Lamp lights along the track illuminate her face. Illumination staggeringly gone; and yet composure is her business. Doris pokes her head out into the site of deep saga. “Aren’t you coming to bed?” In the dark the adult addresses a nightmare and an imperative. Doris sleeps. Susanne doesn’t. At the embarkation point, we see, under someone’s arm, a package with a large eye-like figure, with a shadow on his coat looking like an eyebrow. Along come the girls, and on a train door there is the  sign, 1 and 2. Not 3.

    The two have several hours before a local big-name photographer could deign them an hour of wonderfulness. (Photography being many things.) “Have fun,” Susanne tells the virtuoso of fun. As for the former, her predictable foray to the villa district, where love supposedly lives, and where remarkable foliage goes for naught, yields only the embarrassment of using a phone in a tea room to attempt a rendezvous—many female ears listening—and then being unable to break a large bill for the call and rushing out without paying (becoming the highlight, no doubt, of the day for those ladies who lunch).

The case of Doris is markedly more rich. While window shopping, confronting still life’s, she’s rallied by Otto (only one of his long string of nomenclature connected with being part of an old family of soldiers of fortune), in terms of, “Forgive the intrusion, young lady, but I noticed you admiring that gown.” (While this might ignite “Me Too” thoughts, you’d be in fact off the mark. Doris may be as crass as Monika, but Otto has a life—a life within the concerns driving [however erratically] Susanne. Before leaving on the trip, Doris’ fiancé becomes furious with her perversity, and calls her, “infantile, yes infantile!” And she replies, “I don’t even know what that means!”) Otto provides the gown, and many other costly treats during a whirlwind-cum-feeding-frenzy. But, as with the train ride, the vehicle named Goteborg has a mind of its own. “You must be crazy,” is how Doris tries to maintain a perspective too good to be true, but too good not to bite. The thrust of his campaign is to imagine that the girl is an innovator, able to imagine that he has an almost unique enthusiasm for appreciating her chaste and subtle tastes. “Let’s be the first to break with silly conventions…” Having to debunk his being a rapist was one thing, inasmuch as his demeanor and age tend to confirm the obvious. But Otto has his work cut out when attempting to climb beyond the savage advantages his family (and most families) thrive upon.

    Before allowing Otto to embarrass himself far more damagingly than the way Susanne veered at the tea room, let’s find some continuity with the darkroom and the dark train. Within the niceties of the exclusive salon, Otto introduces the manager to Doris as “Miss Sonderby, my niece. Tonight we’ll be attending a gala concert.” Then, when an acquaintance drops by, he brags, “Actually, she’s my mistress, but I call her my niece for the sake of decency.”(Two sets of candles flank an enormous and lavishly designed mirror. Here the putative payoff third is a figure of a little bird.) Spinning in two directions as he does, Otto opts for more “generosity,” in the form of a neckless to go with the gown. When she shows misgivings, he mocks, “Were there any predators in there?” [in the dress shop]. “Yes, maybe,” she fires back (knowing very well that the fashion industry attracts a lot of jerks). She questions how she could collect the windfall, and he replies, “Don’t be angry. I wasn’t scheming. I’m just cheered by your company, as by sunshine… Come now, let’s make the old jeweler happy.” Not in control of the lucidity he feels from afar, his sweet talk plunges forward into a cynicism he hates himself performing. While she declares, “I don’t want to. I really don’t want to,” he ripostes arrogantly, “Yes you do. Deep down inside, you don’t mind gifts from an old fool.” (In Lesson in Love, Bjornstrand’s David was heard to declare to Andersson’s Nix, “I see everything being infinitely incoherent.” David does nothing to amend his nihilism. Otto’s on deck.) Moving along with his logical struggles, Otto rams the cannon, “If I were young and handsome, there wouldn’t be any problem, but I’m old and fairly ugly. Therefore, thoughts are racing through your little head. Is he a killer, a mental case, a dirty old man or an idiot?” This confuses her. “No, you’re wrong,” the most feeble of logicians argues. “Well, then, let’s look at a neckless of Canadian [exotic?!] river pearls.” Much food for thought comes to bear here. Whereas the ladies of the gowns speak to Parisienne precedents, here a more far-flung treasure comes into view. When the (rather ancient and frail and non-European/ Asiatic) owner comes into view, the arresting interior door seems to dovetail with the general strangeness. A reed-like vision traces down the two edges, while the central factor presents a jungle energy which could denote a singular force. Also, whereas the house of gowns operates on linear principles, this second world is more a curio-shop, Byzantine. Barse, by name, welcomes Otto with, “Good morning, Consul” [a fount of wisdom? a fount of scheming?]. During these preliminaries, Doris wanders around and then pauses in such a way that an elaborate sculpture covers her with a grotesque mask. At which Otto enlightens her that the two men have been playing chess every Thursday for 25 years—a strong dose of scheming. With closure thus rampant, the string of pearls offers something quite different. The marvel consists of periodically positioning each side of the necklace being at a couplet, with the smallest factor at the back, and slightly larger toward a single largest pearl. Mr. Barse goes on to place the treasure around Doris’ neck in such a way that he becomes both the wily chess aficionado and also an honest, passionate lover of necessary spirit. “Look at this, young lady. Just look at it! Each one an individual with its own characteristics and temperament. Yet together they form a whole… an entire little orchestra of perfect virtuosi. How often do we encounter such perfection, Consul?” Barse then initiates, “This is absolute perfection! Shall I clip it on, miss?” Such urgent paradox, consisting of the heart of the adults’ relationship, being wasted upon a brute like Doris. She bolts away from the incomprehensible others; but she can’t resist the lucre. Now Otto is fitted into the jewelry mask, he clearly having much trouble, while hiding ignorance becomes the wrong step. He ploughs ahead with, “Today is your big wishing day[a day with advantage smiling, and leaving the losers down the track]. You can wish for anything. It needn’t be within the bounds of reason….”

    Incidentally, she finally realizes she’s an hour late for the shoot, and after a race along the promenade where the photographic star was to shine, Susanne summarily fires her. Doris bawls like a baby. And the only real interest of that moment is Susanne, first of all excoriating the ex-model—“You can cry all you want. It may impress the men, but not me. I know your type.” (Then emoting, “That indolent girl has always annoyed me [actually not]. I know her kind…. Men, clothes and sex. No sense of honesty. No ambition to learn. They just want the high-life…”). And then coming around to say, “Why did I get so angry? Was I harsh?” (Speaking of post-mortems, with Doris out the door, Otto tells Barse, “She ran off…” The old friend tells him, “Yes. You can’t catch up with her… It would look odd… an elderly man chasing a young girl…”)

    Otto, however, won’t desist from a policy of young and foolish—far more trusting in cheap recklessness than solitary reflection (as if strong feeling need be infantile). She’s not hard to find, and the first step of their last tete a tete is hot chocolate and pastry. Then Doris craves riding on a roller coaster. “Well, that can be arranged!” the sugar daddy, imagining himself to be remarkably sensual, declares. “I’m a great magician. Haven’t you noticed?” The very opposite, of course, occurs, leading the narrative into predictable Hollywood slapstick (and therewith a small-scale follow-up of A Lesson in Love). Doris, and an enthusiast oldster, drag Otto through every gut-twisting ride in the park, culminating in the dizzy, supposed forever-young, falling to the pavement and cutting his hand. However, the risk-taker’s incompetence transcends B-movies, inasmuch as he knows he must dare a current of dynamics foreign to him (and foreign to virtually everyone), while his effete habits massively fail him. The odd couple reach his villa, and things get even worse. First of all, though, the gown arrives, and Doris takes possession. There is about this mansion a shot of the surreal, to counter, somewhat, those two stooges. Doris begins her luxurious good-bye, but she also begins to deal with unemployment. Thus, her patter is, “It’s sad having to part so soon. Don’t you agree, Uncle Otto? We talk like we’re the same age…” (The irony is both sharp and subtle.) Perhaps you think I’m an idiot,” the reflexive martyr bids. That brings to her what she wanted from him. “Shall we have a glass of champagne?” During the hiatus, she comes upon a portrait of a woman who resembles Susanne. We’ve never seen the man Susanne was crazy about—having only that talk on the telephone. But now, with apparent evidence, we’re drawn, momentarily (as a “glitch,” a striking puzzle, so richly covered in the film, Summer Interlude [1951])  to Otto as a (serial) lover. The misapprehension is cleared up by Otto, describing the subject of the painting to be his wife, having been in a mental hospital for 23 years. (Craziness everywhere in this film. Lust and yearning, disclosing a difficult and thrilling infinity.)

    The two users at the mansion get routed by a visit from Otto’s only child, an alcoholic daughter who hated her father on various counts, but especially on the grounds of not handing out as much money as she’d like. (Her mother had come to the idea that her baby girl had a wolf’s head.) The preamble of that conflict was remarkable for a slightly drunk Doris attempting a large-scale looting. On having those pearls placed upon her, Otto adds to the adieu a diamond bracelet once worn by his wife. Then she jumps on to a plush chair and proceeds to hop on it as if it were a trampoline. This moves him into more sobriety, which she notices and tries to mitigate. “Look at Doris! She’s happy!” Fishing for homage, she pries out of him that she’s beautiful, whereupon she asks him to finance repairing a crooked tooth. (“Take a good look. Would you pay for it?”) On to, “Do you think I talk too much. It’s your fault for giving me champagne…” On his assuring her that, “I feel fine, too,” she pounces, “Hey, I know what we’ll do! We’ll make a film! You produce and I’ll star in it! Why not? You have more money than you know what to do with, right? You can buy me a car. A streamlined little sports car that does 150 mph! You know what else I’d like? A house in the country… Can you buy one?” On seeing him less than pleased, she shifts to, “You do understand I’m only joking, Otto dear? I don’t want anything from you. I think you’re so sweet…”

    Eschewing her invitation to “join me on the bearskin rug,” he goes to the music room to face the music—his daughter now in the building, with Doris fearful and not yet a factor. The new factor is very much another shake-down from a young and poisonous girl. Seated on the piano bench, his bid for kinetic music now out of sight, he withstands the hatred and robbery of a wolf head. The latter begins, “I went to see Mother’’—with the corollary, “You didn’t.” “I don’t have the time,” he argues (and don’t jump to the conclusion that his endeavors are entirely frivolous; if with his efforts were to succeed, he’d see the point in visiting his wife). She perseveres, “Dr. Bomark sends regards. He asked why you don’t visit her anymore. She feels neglected…” (Were the scion to argue the point, he might have asked the angel of mercy why he doesn’t attend to his own systemic failings; not to mention Otto’s absolutely insignificant daughter.) Seeing no way to move such masses, he opts for autocracy. “You have your allowance.”/ “It’s not enough… I’ve already started proceedings. You disgust me.” Here various threats and claims result in his increasing the allowance, not that he fears being sued but that he wants his daughter to vanish. Otto’s dead end of the experiment in the form of Doris provides the dreadful daughter a dismissal with some pleasure and cheap advantage. Getting a glimpse of Doris in the not entirely closed adjacent room, she goes on to slap the interloper and takes for herself the family bracelet. (That the daughter’s name is Marianne unlocks that name for many figures to come, in Bergman’s work of starting becoming endings.) After Marianne departs, Doris comes up behind him, saying, “Good-bye. I’m leaving. Thanks for a nice afternoon. You’ve been kind to me.” He tells her, “Get out. Leave. Go, I said…” He looks out the window. She tells him the gown and necklace are in there. And the matching shoes to the gown. Doris runs from the mansion becoming a roller coaster she takes no fun from. Outside, she stops for a last look at an impenetrable hardness. He’s still in the window. He’s still in the dark.

Now it’s Susanne’s turn to tangle with the infantile. She generously reinstates Doris, but wants her out of the hotel room while she catches up with her weakness. Henrik, the elusive lover, is ill at ease and she tasks him at a much more gentle tone than that of the chamber of the wolf. “It’s been a long time… seven months… We briefly met in Hamburg…” He emends, “You got there just as I was leaving…” (an ironic reprise of the mental hospital gotcha). Adding some drama to the malaise, he declares, “I’ll probably be bankrupt within six months… Money never meant much to me. But I’m feeling old. I have no desire, no energy to start all over. I really long for a little peace and quiet… I’m like a hamster on the wheel…” Susanne, controlling, for a moment, anyway, her desperation, and seeing that Henrik has become virtually dysfunctional, takes charge by saying, “I shouldn’t have made you come… Yes, it was foolish of me.” (The preface of that magnanimity, however, was the subtle demand, “If you want to go, don’t let me stop you” [touching his cheek to further muddy the message].) He kisses her hand, more ambiguity. Then he elaborates, “I’m not the same Henrik you once loved. As you probably notice…” Her debater’s step is questionable. “I’m not the same, either” [so we’re still a match?]. His, “No. You’re even more beautiful,” undercuts her pretense of fading. That she has a fantasy, of taking him in her hands and carrying him around in her pocket, speaks more to a static fetish than an interplay of love. In enunciating this hope, she presents a delivery close to benediction. “Yes, it’s been hell,” she cries. “I’ve tried to forget you, to hate you. I’ve tried everything to get you out of my system. With no success. I’m completely helpless…” They (as with Doris’ abortive departure at the villa) face an end to their constellation, only to prolong it to devastating ends, which display more of their rampant cheesy melodramatic soap opera.

    “One must not lose face,” the bankrupt lover insists. “You’re right. Saving face is important.” (Both of them already slipping off any range of sensual vigor, sensual dignity—and thereby humiliated by life—they cobble a pact as if offsetting a plague, temporarily fooling themselves into crisis management.) Their flimsy outlook falls apart immediately with a phone call that refuses to identify the caller. Susanne, seriously deflated now, hunches over. He lifts up her chin and covers her face with his hands. He caresses her face. A pan shot brings their kiss to soap opera dismay. She avers, “At times when I fall asleep, you are so near I could reach out… I could almost feel your breath on my cheek. When I wake up you aren’t there. I search all over for you… I didn’t think I could live a minute longer without having you close.” (Here the fulsome parody of Hollywood Depression Era movies puts in I a little encore.) “Hour after hour, day after day… I even laugh sometimes… Sometimes I even forget you… If only we had a child together.” (In A Lesson in Love, Eva Dahlbeck urges that gambit to Gunner Bjornstrand as a hope to overcoming their nullity.) Shifting from that, she dregs up the idea of borrowing Henrik a few weeks a year…“I’m almost on my knees begging…” (This quite dismal retreat from Susanne’s rather sketchy but arresting accomplishments must form part of a study of the post mortem here, of what is vaguely active and crucial.) Maintaining the rout, he declares, “I’m nothing, Susanne. A used-up article of consumption ready to be thrown in the trash… I’m your old teddy bear, aren’t I?” She longs, then, to be a witch. Otto claimed to be a magician—another power fantasy. She longs to have his wife and children dead. “Do you hate me for that?”/ “I don’t understand you…”/ “I’m almost sick with hatred!” That extremity seems to, first of all, slide into the prospect of joining him next week in Oslo. “Can you come? I’ll be there five days…”/ “I can’t, but I’ll be there… I’m so happy!… God I’m so happy I could cry!” Raining on this giddiness is his wife at the desk, headed to their rendezvous. (A similar hotel invasion occurs in A Lesson in Love, with Eva Dahlbeck being the wounded wife. But whereas that incident is largely treated as a comedy, this matter is gravely punishing.)

Henrik’s wife brings to the deviance far more than soap opera and its gushing Olympics. (This, also, adding to the saga, a sense of the shabbiness of Otto’s conflict with his daughter.) Susanne declares to the rival that she’s going to Oslo, whether you like it or not. “And you think he’s happy about what you’ve decided? [Henrik is hunkered down as if in a storm.] He’s not, I assure you. He’s in torment. And tomorrow he’ll be worse… I know him.”/ “And I don’t?” the smart lady fires, glaring at her./ “I don’t think so,” the self-possessed (maybe too self-possessed) visitor rules. “You had a wonderful year together. You gave him a lot…” Henrik asks, “Can we bring an end to this embarrassing discussion? I feel pretty silly, as was your intention, Marta. It’s only natural…” She on a gratifying roll, instigates, “Have you considered the future? Whatever happens, don’t become desperate. One must always keep a cool head… Our mutual strength, Henrik.” With this line, a smug line, we have the makings of a civil war. Marta, being a stalwart of prose, while Susanne, a rebel at heart—but not brave and resolved enough—attempts poetry (the poetry that the surreal nudges her).

    “Don’t look at me that way,” Susanne tells the cool head. (At her best, our protagonist, however vaguely and falteringly, knows that the paragon of reason here knows nothing about life.) Marta can measure Henrik to a degree; but she can’t grasp that the humiliated husband has an overdrive, however defective and now to the point of paralysis. “If he’d really loved you, he’d have left me… You broke it off and said, ‘Either I’ll have it all or nothing. No compromises for me!’” Susanne, well aware that the jig is up, brazens, “So what?” To be smugly met with, “You miscalculated that time. You thought he loved you enough to leave everything and live with you. But he stayed with me. Not because he loves me, but because he’s tired. He’s too tired for everything we own together. Being with you means life, strong emotions and all kinds of demands… And remorse. He can’t help being filled with remorse, poor Henrik. Life together with me means peace, serenity and a good sleep… And life with the children. You know children are the strongest factor. That’s why you wanted a child by Henrik. Yes, you want a child to have a hold on him, or a memento of a lost love. We women romanticize our motives. You’re no exception…” Susanne wants this bore out, but the latter has one more brick to throw. “Henrick is bankrupt, yes. But I have independent means. We’ll go on living as we have. In the same comfort, no worries… To women, material well-being isn’t that important, as we both know. But it’s vital to a man…” Marta, actually part of the constituency of ladies who lunch, and imagining to be sharp as a tack, dishes out some final smug hate. “I feel so sorry for you. It’s all over. To me, everything is over. Even the jealousy. But why hate me so?” Susanne, for all her disarray, knows that Marta is trash.

Henrik tries to repair the unrepairable; she has a brief relapse when he comes back to retrieve his briefcase (“Oh my love!”); he moots their Oslo trip being doable; and her final position is, “God, I’ve been stupid! So incredibly, disgustingly, terribly stupid.” She rams her fists into her mouth. Three flanges of the curtain appear. Dancing to those features are for subsequent visitors. Back home, Doris has learned nothing from being burned. Before returning to Stockholm, she tells Susanne, “Being a working woman isn’t easy. Balancing a private life and a job! What a problem!” Susanne, virtually another species entirely, would find much irony in a Kindergarten version of what is killing her. Back at the studio, our protagonist is shrouded in stylish gloom, much like the day we first saw her and her hidden métier of outlaw optics. Seated close to the whale-like comptroller, she rips up a note charting a plan by Henrik, dismissing it as, “just another begging letter.” His reply is, “One has to say no at some point.”

Could we have here, in the hugely inert player, the makings of a counter attack of something very different, as charted by saying no. No, no, no…No to overblown treasures, no to overblown wholesomeness. The little dream works of Susanne, in need of a drastic overhaul.