THREE STRANGE LOVES: FILM NOTES

by Philip Strick

When his first film, Crisis (1946), was generally regarded as a disaster, Ingmar Bergman
was forced to realize, on approaching the age of 28, that while he boasted plenty of self-
taught ability he still had much to learn about how to use it. In despair, he was also in
luck: three men were prepared to guide him through the mistakes, the experiments, and
the precarious successes of the next decade. On stage, Torsten Hammarén, the director of
Gothenburg City Theatre, backed and bullied Bergman through ten productions
(including two of Bergman's own plays) on a three-year contract. On film, the
independent producer Lorens Marmstedt steered him through four cinematic projects
with "wisdom, thoughtfulness and patience. It was he who taught me how to make films."

Bergman's third 'teacher' was the prominent theatre critic Herbert Grevenius, a friend he
could consult on a daily basis and an invaluable collaborator and script-doctor. "When I
was green and unformed," Bergman recalls in his autobiography, "I learnt my craft from
Hammarén, and orderliness of thought from Grevenius: they pinched me, kneaded me,
and put me right." They could do little, though, to restore order to Bergman's chaotic
private life. Although paying with difficulty for the upkeep to two marriages, he was
"careless and extravagant" and trapped in a home that "seethed with crying children,
damp washing, weeping women and raging scenes of jealousy, often perfectly justified."
It was good script material and was duly transformed into To Joy (made in 1949), but
first, to compensate (as he put it) for being a complete mess as a human being, Bergman
decided he must at least try to shine as a filmmaker. With Three Strange Loves, brought
to him already scripted by Grevenius, he had the opportunity to give a convincing
demonstration of sheer professional skill.

The screenplay was based on a controversial collection of short stories, Torst (Thirst) by
Birgit Tengroth. Better known as an actress, she began her screen career in 1926 when
she was eleven. After five years at the Royal Opera's ballet school, she had been in more
than forty productions—notably Dollar (1938) with Ingrid Bergman—by the time she
appeared in A Soldier's Reminder (1947), filmed from a Grevenius play. She was the
logical choice to play a leading role in her own stories, adding to their disquieting
authenticity, and Grevenius adapted them with considerable ingenuity. Thirst became a
flashback to Rut's unhappy affair with Raoul, The Faith Healer became Viola's visit to the
psychiatrist, and Avant de Mourir was Viola's disastrous evening with the predatory
Valborg. The linking narrative, the turbulent train-ride from Basle to Stockholm as
endured by Rut and her long-suffering husband Bertil, was derived from Journey with
Arethusa, complete with meaningful currency.

According to Greek mythology, the nymph Arethusa—so Bertil tells us—was so

passionately pursued by an ardent hunter, Alpheus, that to avoid him she was turned into
a spring on the island of Ortygin. Undaunted, Alpheus changed into a river that travelled
under the Aegean seabed to be reunited with the waters of the spring. Much enhanced
over the years (some versions suggest that Arethusa was fathered by Zeus and became
one of the Hesperides, guardians of the Golden Apples ultimately stolen by Hercules), the
story takes on an intriguing ambiguity when applied to Rut and Bertil, who identify with
the mythical couple but with different interpretations. "The two sexes can never unite,"
says Bertil. "A sea of tears and misunderstanding lies between them." Rut disagrees, but
to judge from the film's final images, haunted by the Syracusan coin, Bergman doesn't.

It is indeed a film about contradictions, each section based on argument and tension.
Although the more waspish exchanges could only have come from Bergman (wife to
husband: "I hate you so much I want to live just to make your life hell"), the messages in
Three Strange Loves are as much visual as verbal. Bergman was intrigued by the
potentially seductive glow of a match-flame held close to the face: "this was Birgit
Tengroth's idea—I had never done anything like that. To build the plot with almost
imperceptible details became a special component in my future filmmaking."
Accordingly, his scenes are enriched with contributory extras—a snake on an ant-hill, a
clattering mannequin, a crystal carafe signifying (after Rut's abortion) an unquenchable
thirst, a cigarette-lighter clicking on and off, a dropped handkerchief, maybe even a hat
that vanishes. By drowning his heroines off-screen, the ripples of her departure barely
disturbing the tangle of ropes and reflections that evoke her plight, Bergman actually
contrives to leave open the likelihood that she'll be rescued and sent (as promised by her
psychiatrist) to a mental home.

Outdoors, the sweltering blaze of midsummer seems to be on the attack, anticipating the
images at the start of Wild Strawberries and illustrating an unexpected Bergman phobia.
"For me," says the director of Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika, "July and
August, when the sun shines day after day, are a dreadful torment." On film, the cruel
contrast between sunlight and shadow, a stark black-and-white geometry, also seems
derived from the menacing decor of the German expressionist melodramas that Bergman
greatly admired, particularly apparent here in the grim cut-out ruins glimpsed alongside
the train journey.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Three Strange Loves is the new confidence and
fluency with which Bergman uses the camera. The sometimes laboured symbolism of
earlier films has become subtler: now everything, unobtrusively, has a meaning, even the
glimpse of the director himself. The eloquence of the prowling camera, no longer
creaking and hesitant as it was in Crisis, reinforces both motion and emotion,
accentuating the drama with single takes and drawing the audience into a participation of
mood—as with the cunningly angled shot that lifts Viola from her chair on an escape
route immediately blocked by Valborg, a deliberate repeat of the moment when she
evaded the vampiric Doctor Rosengren by leaping up from his chair. "The film does
show," Bergman said in retrospect, "a respectable cinematographic vitality. I was
developing my own way of making movies."