Cinema: Northern Indictment

All These Women, for all its faults, may well stand as a milestone in the career of Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman. It is his first film in color. It is lavish in decor. Though it fails miserably, it is the work of a man who falls flat on his face with impressive aplomb. Behind a transparent disguise as a knockabout farce, it is Bergman’s personal indictment of his own critics and public.

As the film begins, a world-famous cellist lies dead, mourned in turn by his critic-biographer, six black-veiled mistresses and his wife. Flashbacks detail the end of the great man’s life in a series of slapstick sketches played against the ricky-tick accompaniment of Yes! We Have No Bananas. In the sprawling Villa Tremolo, where he keeps his women (among them such Bergman favorites as Eva Dahlbeck, Bibi Andersson and Harriet Andersson), Maestro Felix is heard but seldom seen. The women are the issue, for the artist’s playthings, like his public, adore him, scorn him, help him, hinder him, pay him all the tributes that mediocrity pays to genius—and when he is gone, they quickly find another genius to take his place.

Bergman’s primary target is the foppish critic (Jarl Kulle) who sniffs out the “personal details” of Felix’s life, even appropriates one of his mistresses. He composes critical jargon so dense that he himself cannot penetrate it (“What the hell do I mean by that?”), writes atrocious music, and finally wheedles Felix into playing it. Once compromised, the cellist collapses, corporeally and artistically kaput.

Despite an occasional stab of wit, Bergman’s portrait of the artist as the victim of his fickle followers and corrupt critics, if it is funny at all, is heavy, testy humor. Teeth clenched, he wields the apparatus of slapstick boldly, but draws neither laughs nor blood because his northern variations on 8½ do not lend themselves to pie-in-the-face comedy. Even the most accomplished cinema stylist can scarcely hope, perhaps, to be the Fellini of the frost belt and a Scandinavian Sennett at the same time.