The Touch (1971) | Little White Lies

The Touch (1971)

25 Feb 2018

Affectionate couple embracing outdoors, man in olive jacket, woman in knitted hat
Affectionate couple embracing outdoors, man in olive jacket, woman in knitted hat
3

Anticipation.

Results may vary when European directors make movies in other countries, especially during the 1970s.

4

Enjoyment.

Gould is great but Andersson is astounding.

4

In Retrospect.

Effortlessly brilliant, even if its central drama starts to feel oppressive in its latter stages.

Ing­mar Bergman’s first Eng­lish-lan­guage fea­ture is a lost, mid-career gem, unearthed and restored by the BFI.

There’s some­thing about this lac­er­at­ing exam­i­na­tion of knee­jerk mar­i­tal infi­deli­ty that prompts you to won­der whether its mak­er, the Swedish writer/​director Ing­mar Bergman, is hav­ing a bit of a laugh. With­in sec­onds of the film start­ing, it plumbs the very depths of bleak­ness as Bibi Andersson’s perky, elfin house­wife, Karin, is informed that she has arrived at the hos­pi­tal just a tad too late to bid farewell to her now deceased moth­er. They called her in, but the she just wasn’t able to zip across town fast enough to wit­ness the dying of that par­tic­u­lar light.

The ques­tion, then: does her life imme­di­ate­ly after that aus­tere junc­ture get bet­ter or worse? Do these sub­tle trau­mas, which appear to have no dis­cernible effect on her emo­tions of psy­cho­log­i­cal well­be­ing, bore down to the inner depths of her soul and start to send silent sig­nals of self loathing? Does she react to a sud­den change with­out being aware of the impulse that dri­ves her?

Wan­der­ing a cor­ri­dor in a semi daze, Karin bumps into David (Elliott Gould), a raff­ish Amer­i­can arche­ol­o­gist sport­ing a tou­sled beard and lots of cor­duroy. The next thing she knows, David is in her house and she’s serv­ing him cock­tails, appar­ent­ly, we learn, a guest of her meek and mild hus­band Andreas (Max von Sydow) who works as a doctor.

With her beam­ing smile and cour­te­ous man­ner, she skil­ful­ly dodges David’s intense gaze and basks in pet­ty bour­geoise bliss. Andreas wan­ders into anoth­er room for a moment and David makes his move. I love you’, he admits with wor­ry­ing casu­al­ness. Karin is shocked. She instant­ly rebuffs him, but then instant­ly regrets her deci­sion to do so. Per­haps her recent brush with death has prompt­ed her to ques­tion the secure, shel­tered exis­tence she leads. Maybe this could be a way to mix things up a lit­tle, to assert her inde­pen­dence and expe­ri­ence some­thing new?

Bergman charts their tor­rid affair in unbear­able detail – the expe­ri­ence is a lit­tle like being trapped in a ocean lin­er cab­in with with a pair of lusty but ret­i­cent swingers. Gould con­vinces as a randy, dis­placed Amer­i­can who is in Swe­den to sym­bol­i­cal­ly exca­vate a Madon­na stat­ue in an ancient church. His light­ly exot­ic oth­er­ness lends the nar­ra­tive a cer­tain cred­i­bil­i­ty, as it may ini­tial­ly seem as if Karin entered into this tryst in the knowl­edge that he’ll be leav­ing soon and she’ll be able to file it away in her mem­o­ries. But it isn’t as easy as that.

Visu­al­ly the film is flat and ugly, but per­haps pur­pose­ful­ly so. David’s apart­ment is a green-paint­ed hov­el strewn with dust and dog-eared papers. Bergman appears to be say­ing that hygiene is no imped­i­ment to love, and that part of David’s appeal for Katrin is that she is final­ly able to know what it’s like to get her hands dirty. What makes the sto­ry inter­est­ing is the many sub­tle twists along the way, and the fact that all three of the cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist reveal sur­pris­ing hid­den depths, or sel­dom react to a sit­u­a­tion in a pre­dictable way.

Maybe this film, which famous­ly flopped at the box office on its release in 1971, is lit­tle more than tri­al run for the director’s 1973 mag­num opus, Scenes from a Mar­riage, itself a foren­sic study of a bro­ken mar­riage. Yet even Bergman mere­ly riff­ing on a theme is far more absorb­ing and provoca­tive than most pre­tenders to the throne.

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