THREE STRANGE LOVES (1949)
d: Ingmar Bergman

Earlier this year I purchased every film in print on DVD which Ingmar Bergman made between 1946 and 1964. V.G. and I have started watching them chronologially, with the intention of eventually seeing all his filmography. Previously to THREE STRANGE LOVES, we've watched CRISIS (1946) and PORT OF CALL (1948), his first and fifth films, respectively.

CRISIS is clumsy, uncertain, and one-dimensionally melodramatic. It is not a terrible film, but only hindsight makes it possible to recognize it as a Bergman film. Four films later, PORT OF CALL deepens the melodrama and gives us characters who are internally conflicted as well as in conflict with those around them. It also, clumsily but not without effect, grafts the melodrama to issues which shift the overall generic catagory toward social realism. (I plan to come back to both films in detail soon, so that Bergmania! is fully documented.)

Seeing these early films has made it easy to recognize that all Bergman's films are melodramas. The differences between these trial efforts and the later masterpieces are in the depths of psychological sophistication, the increasing multidimensionality of the characters, and of course the effects of collaborating with master craftsmen.

THREE STRANGE LOVES is an inherently more interesting work than CRISIS. However, it is a quite different film from PORT OF CALL. That film's social realism is present in THREE STRANGE LOVES only in a few shots of the post-war poor begging at the windows of a stopped train during a journey across Germany. Social realism would place an unreasonable demand on these characters - that they take notice of people outside their own stifling relationships.

THREE STRANGE LOVES packs an almost absurd amount of delirious melodrama into a brief 90 minutes. Infidelity, betrayal, abortion all occur in the first few minutes. Don't worry about these mild spoilers, there are plenty more twists and turns as the film works its way through the agonizing lives of these bitter, self-absorbed people. THREE STRANGE LOVES is Screwball Melodrama.

This is not to belittle the film, as its excesses are tempered with some fine performances. The actors play it straight, stoic at times or seething with inner panics, but never tearing loose. Hystrionics would have brought out the worst in the events of the plot but the cool approach somehow keeps it all working.

The cloistered quality of Bergman interiors has begun to manifest in THREE STRANGE LOVES. The rooms in which couples taunt and torment each other almost become third characters. When the characters fall into pained silences, the stillness and mundanity of the spaces they inhabit fill with tense anticipation. Physical space becomes psychological space, unlike the aloof social spaces of the Neorealists, whose major works were roughly contemporaneous with these early Bergmans.