Sunday, January 06, 2013

Movie review - Bergman#11 - "Secrets of Women" (1952) ***

Bergman's take on A Letter for Three Wives - four women chat in a summer cottage while waiting for their husbands, each one flashing back to an adventure they'd had in the past. One has an affair, with quite a sexy seduction scene followed by a a boring denouement involving her husband; one flashes back to her pregnancy where she flashed back to getting pregnant (a summer affair in Paris); one remembers being stuck in an elevator with her husband who she normally doesn't spend much time with. A fourth, which is played out and not a flashback, decides to elope.

I really liked this - I didn't expect to, and the stories aren't that amazing but all of them are different. The first one is this sort of erotic melodrama, similar in many ways to later Bergman, full of sex and angst and married people battling on no matter want; the second one has an extended silent sequence and is highly visual (the director flexing his visual muscles and pulling it off, helped off course by his ace cinematographer); the third one is two people stuck in a room learning to reconnect (it reminded me in a way of the Linda Darnell Paul Douglas scene in Wives).

It's not a masterpiece but it's well done with some accomplished acting and is consistently interesting. 

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