Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words

“Last night a man at din­ner said to me, ​‘You’ll nev­er be an actress. You’re too tall’.” Ingrid Bergman wrote this in her diary in 1939. ​“I thought, he knows noth­ing about me.” Short­ly after this dis­clo­sure in Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words, we see footage from her first screen test for David O Selznik. The young actress sits on a couch, look­ing relaxed as she glances around and smiles, and then she com­pos­es her­self and stares direct­ly into the cam­era, deliv­er­ing a pierc­ing gaze that has a heart-stop­ping impact. If the man who sat next to her at din­ner had seen this footage, he would have been forced to imme­di­ate­ly eat his words. She was clear­ly born to be a movie star.

Stig Björkman’s doc­u­men­tary is more about the woman than the movie star, how­ev­er. Draw­ing on her diary entries and let­ters (read with a great depth of feel­ing by Swedish star du jour Ali­cia Vikan­der), he has skil­ful­ly assem­bled a touch­ing and inti­mate por­trait of a rest­less spir­it who fol­lowed her heart’s desire. ​“I have a bird of pas­sage inside me, always want­i­ng more, des­per­ate to flex its wings,” she once said, and so she pur­sued every oppor­tu­ni­ty for artis­tic and roman­tic ful­fil­ment, with her chil­dren some­times appear­ing to be an after­thought. The film focus­es pri­mar­i­ly on this rela­tion­ship, as Bergman’s off­spring recall their child­hood upheaval and the fleet­ing moments of hap­pi­ness they would enjoy togeth­er after months apart. Daugh­ter Isabel­la Rosselli­ni was even thank­ful that she under­went an oper­a­tion for sco­l­io­sis when she was 11 years old because her moth­er final­ly took time off to take care of her.

Bergman’s writ­ing shows her to be strik­ing­ly inde­pen­dent and self-pos­sessed, firm in her con­vic­tions and unshak­en by the doubts of oth­ers. We shouldn’t for­get just how bold she was to leave behind a com­fort­able Amer­i­can career to make the film Strom­boli with Rober­to Rosselli­ni (“If Hol­ly­wood could see me now!” she wrote with glee). Or how unflap­pable she was when her affair with the Ital­ian direc­tor whipped up a ludi­crous scan­dal that made her a US exile for sev­en years. If she had any regrets, she nev­er showed them; in fact, when an inter­view­er asked her this ques­tion she sim­ply replied, ​“I regret the things I didn’t do, not what I did.”

At 114 min­utes, Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words can be a lit­tle monot­o­ne (Michael Nyman’s recy­cled score doesn’t help in this regard), and the late con­tri­bu­tions from Sigour­ney Weaver and Liv Ull­mann feel out of place, but the film is nev­er less than engag­ing and it is a trea­sure trove of won­der­ful images. Pia Lindström says her mother’s great­est love affair was with the cam­era, and that’s borne out by how radi­ant she looks through­out. From play­ing with her fam­i­ly in home movies to lark­ing about on the set of Joan of Arc; from the young ingénue on Selznik’s couch to the aged woman in Ing­mar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata – she was a unique­ly cap­ti­vat­ing pres­ence. In a touch­ing rev­e­la­tion, Ingrid recalls a moment of inse­cu­ri­ty when Ing­mar Bergman asked her to appear with­out make­up in Autumn Sonata, fear­ing that the real­i­ty of her 63-year-old face might deter her fans. ​“Don’t wor­ry” her direc­tor replied, ​“I’ll get you new ones”. This film might just do the same.