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• Technoguy said...

  Posted on May 25 2008 23:02 The best ever version by a man who both directed plays and films.The plays central location in the kitchen is opened up into the surrounding landscape.The two chief characters are brilliant,both vulnerable and vying for the upper position.In a survival of the fittest only one can win.The brilliant use of flashback,dream sequences,people from different times in the same scene.The subtle use of lighting to heighten the psycho-drama,the beautiful fluidity of the cinematography,great movement and framing.There are scenes here that Orson Welles must have raided for his 2 best films,Citizen Cane and The Magnificent Andersons.The film depicts the gendre politics and class consciousness of this forerunner of DHLawrence.What is especially interesting is the way images dissolve into other images bringing to the fore(more than in the play)
  memories of the past of the two lead characters.There is a good dream sequence where she is on a high rock,can't move,fears falling,then falls;his dream is of a man always climbing to the top most branch and can never reach the fruit.He longs to be loved by her,longs for the unattainnable.She knows that sex is the great fall.Bergman followed on and overtook Sjoberg as the magus of Swedish cinema but this film has the structure of a well made play with a mercurial swiftness of image and the conveyance of emotion that could have taught the younger man a few things.

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