From: frankm@microsoft.com (Frank R.A.J. Maloney)
Subject: REVIEW: THE BEST INTENTIONS
Reply-To: frankm@microsoft.com (Frank R.A.J. Maloney)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 16:16:35 GMT
Followup-To: rec.arts.movies
Summary: r.a.m.r. #01497
Keywords: author=Maloney

			     THE BEST INTENTIONS
		       A film review by Frank Maloney
			Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney

     THE BEST INTENTIONS is a Swedish film directed by Bille August,
from a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman.  It stars Pernilla August, Samuel
Froler, Max Von Sydow, Ghita Norby.  Unrated.  Swedish with English
subtitles.

     THE BEST INTENTIONS examines the subject of love.  It is Ingmar
Bergman's story about the courting and mating of his parents, Henrik and
Anna Bergman.  It is also about the love of the son for his parents.
And as it turned out, the love between Bille August and Pernilla
Ostergren August, who married and had a child during the filming of THE
BEST INTENTIONS.  (At one point in the story, Henrik lifts up Anna's
shift to reveal her swollen abdomen--a beautiful and shocking moment
because it is so clearly not a prosthetic.  It is also shocking that the
story says so clearly that love is a matter of forgiveness.  Throughout
the film, one character after another says, "Forgive me" or "I can never
forgive you" or finally "How can we ever forgive each other?"  I freely
admit I don't spend a lot of time thinking about love in the abstract so
maybe I am the last person on the planet to whom this is going to be an
amazing insight, but it comes close to being an epiphany for me, one for
which I am greatful in the extreme to Messrs August and Bergman.

     Their collaboration has produced a beautiful, thoughtful film,
intense, involving, complex in its characterizations.  They actually
produced two products, a six-hour version for Swedish television and the
three-hour theatrical release.  The theatrical version has already
earned two Palmes d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (Best Picture and
Best Actress), and if it doesn't get the Best Foreign Film at the Oscars
I'll be mightily surprised.  Certainly, they've managed to make the
three hours move along briskly without producing a brisk movie.  It is
only at the very end, when perhaps I was just plain exhausted by the
emotional intensities of Henrik, Anna, and all their kin, that I became
aware of the length of the film.  The pacing is certainly slow and
deliberate, with painterly shots of the changing Swedish landscapes and
long, long moments of merely looking at one or two characters, of
looking into their eyes, of seeing their pain, their conflicts, their
love.  The cinematographer was Jorgen Persson, who has captured the
thin, soft light of the North that so perfectly reflects the
clouded-over emotions of these restrained and passionate Swedes.

     I read that Bergman, always the brilliant casting director,
insisted on Pernilla August for the part of Anna, the bourgeois princess
who defies her own, rock-solid mother to marry Henrik.  As Pernilla
Allwin, the actor had appeared as the maid in Bergman's final
directorial effort, FANNY AND ALEXANDER, which dramatized his parents'
later years.  Bergman said, "Films begin with the human face" -- an
insight lost on most Hollywood filmmakers, who appear to begin with a
marketing concept.  Bergman has filled his films with the likes of Bibi
and Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullman, and Lena Olin.  Pernilla August
continues that tradition.  Hers is not exactly a pretty face, but it is
appealing and it is strong; in the beginning of the movie, the actress
is visibly too old for her role -- this is going to be my only, and
distinctly minor, cavil.  She has something more important, and
certainly more lasting, than the prettiness of youth; she has radiance,
authority, energy, and great conviction.  One reviewer quotes her as
saying that August's slow pace let the actors achieve "the natural way
of acting.  .  .  .  When a movie goes so fast, and you want to tell so
much, then you take away the feelings from the audience.  If you go
slow, then the audience gets a chance to feel, to react."

     Much less is written about Samuel Froler in the role of Henrik
Bergman, the desperately poor, psychologically scarred divinity student
who stubbornly crosses class lines to woo and wed Anna, even as he
castigates himself for being a fool, for knowing that it will end in
failure.  During one of their marital crises, he cries out "I knew it
all along that you'd leave me."  It's a shame that the critics are
tending to overlook Froler's performance because it is every bit as
strong as Pernilla August's and he is an equally attractive screen
presence.  (Of course, Froler did not win a prize at Cannes as his
co-star Pernilla August, and therefore doesn't attract the publicity;
neither did he marry the director.)  The mysticism, the unhealing hurts,
the doubts, the love, the complexities of an extremely difficult but
worthy human being, all these qualities come out in the wonderful job
Froler turns in.

     I cannot recommend THE BEST INTENTIONS too highly to you.  You
simply must see it and you must see it on the big screen.

-- 
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney