![]() ![]() The New Land picks up from the moment The Emigrants ends. ![]() Released together in one package, The Emigrants ( Utvandrarna, 1971) and The New Land ( Nybyggarna, 1972) are – fittingly – seamlessly of a piece with each other. Striking the balance between the mundane and the momentous with such delicacy results in landmark cinema. Her final lie to Jacob accepts this truth, but at least as he dies she can make his own cell a little more peaceful.Troell weaves such moments seamlessly into a grand, sweeping arc for which the only word is epic. To know herself is to accept that no one else will ever truly know her. Anna's problem is not morality but consciousness. It is about Bergman's eternal theme, which is that we are all locked in our own boxes of time and space, and most of us never escape them. There is just the hint-the barest hint, a whisper only-that the one man in Anna's life who might have given her what she craved was Uncle Jacob.Ī film like "Private Confessions'' makes most films about romance look like films about plumbing. To understand it completely, we have to remember "The Best Intentions,'' which tells the story of Anna and Henrik's courtship, and shows her as warm and generous, he as already crippled by a cold childhood and an inferiority complex. It is about loneliness, and the attempt to defeat it while living within rigid moral guidelines. His advice to her at this time is the best he ever gives her. One must, of course, be in a state of grace and readiness to take the sacrament, and she does not feel she is. In it she confesses to Jacob that she does not feel ready to take communion the next day. They take communion together, and that sets up the fifth conversation, which takes place before all the others, the day before young Anna's confirmation. He feels "gray and inadequate,'' Tomas tells her the morning after, and keeps repeating, "One must be true.'' Is it Anna's fate to forever dash her passion against the stony shores of men who think before they feel? The fourth conversation, which contains the heart of the film, takes place 10 years later, when Jacob is dying, and wants to know the truth about what happened-about whether Anna followed his advice. Here we get insights into the nature of their relationship, and there is the possibility that for a lover Anna may have selected the man similar to her husband. No wonder, he shouts, that the house contains "chipped glasses, stained cloths, dead plants.'' The third conversation takes place before the other two, and involves a rendezvous between Anna and Tomas, which she has arranged in the home of a friend. In the second conversation, set a few weeks later, she follows his advice, and we see that Henrik ( Samuel Froler) is a cold man who views adultery less as a matter of passion than as a breach of contract. Jacob tells her she must break off the relationship and tell everything to her husband. She has cheated on her husband, Henrik, with a younger man, Tomas. She confesses to him that she has been an unfaithful wife. Jacob led young Anna through her confirmation, and they meet again as the film opens in the summer of 1925. ![]() He replaced it with "private conversations'' in which sins and moral questions could be discussed with an adviser. It is often wrongly thought, he tells Anna, that Luther abolished the Catholic sacrament of confession. The film is divided into five "conversations.'' An explanation is offered early, by Uncle Jacob. The actress playing Anna, his mother, is Pernilla August, who also played Anna in "The Best Intentions.'' Uncle Jacob, Anna's spiritual adviser, is Max von Sydow, the tall, spare presence in so many Bergman films from "The Seventh Seal'' onward. The cinematographer is wise old Sven Nykvist, his collaborator for 30 years. "Private Confessions,'' based on Bergman's 1966 book, has been directed by Liv Ullmann, an actress in many of his best films. One would not live to 81 and tell these stories only to falsify them. He calls these films fictions because he imagines things he could not have seen, but there is no doubt they are true to his feelings about his parents. Now comes "Private Confessions,'' the story of his mother's moral struggles. "Sunday's Children'' (1994), directed by Bergman's son Daniel, was about the boy's uneasy relationship with his father. ![]()
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