The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971)

Ingmar Bergman’s The Touch is a work of contrast and opposition, inevitably (for better and for worse) less unified and imposing than we often expect of his work. The most obvious contrast exists between the Bergman milieu we’re accustomed to (Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson’s long-married couple) and the very different cultural resonances attaching to Elliott Gould, playing David, a visiting archaeologist who has an affair with Andersson’s Karin (the optimal prints are those in which the couple and others use English with Gould, and Swedish otherwise). Bergman presents the marriage as being essentially happy, if stagnant - Sydow’s Andreas is submerged in his work, Karin in domesticity and ritual (the film is sometimes oddly and parodically peppy in portraying this); in contrast, David is unstable and destabilizing, subject to erratic impulses and mood swings (and frequently changing hairstyles). The demands of the present – the lying and evasion required of Karin in maintaining the affair – contrast with the inescapable burdens of the past: the evocation of the Holocaust in David’s family history, and of centuries past in his work. It’s never that simple though, and Bergman keeps challenging our understanding of the relationship and the film: an almost offhand reference to a suicide attempt by David and an even less resolved one to Karin’s pregnancy; the late introduction of David’s sister in London, heavily trailing other unexplored narratives; a long-dormant cluster of larvae that come back to destructive life. The ending, somewhat displaced from the main body of the film, places us in a garden, and a final attempt at paradise that rapidly disintegrates into further disrepair and separation. If the film under-achieves and frustrates, as has often been claimed, then that may be because of its unusual and productive openness and receptivity; either way, it ranks in Bergman’s body of work as more than a mere oddity.