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"A dumb story," shrugs one of the characters, "a moral story" as Rohmer would have it. A sewing circle while the husbands run late (cf. Antonioni's Le Amiche), nothing to do but commiserate about the compromises of marriage in a trio of tales. A revived affair for the wife (Anita Björk) of the antiquities professor (Karl-Arne Holmsten), "the danger of longing" embodied by the loutish former flame (Jarl Kulle). Out of frigidity and into shame, the punchline of faithlessness over loneliness after a chuckle at Freud's fish. Mankiewicz's A Letter to Three Wives informs the structure plus a Lubitsch pinch or two along the way (a ribald cabaret trick reflected on four lecherous faces and a victorious trumpet blast), for Ingmar Bergman a workshop of cinematic styles. In the second episode, he molds the memory of the pregnant belle in Paris (Maj-Britt Nilsson) into a mini-silent drama out of dense impressions (changing angles and chiming clocks, wandering lights and tolling bells). Between a night of passion with the painter (Birger Malmsten) and screams in the maternity ward, the baleful figure behind the frosted-glass door: "I had the terrible feeling that it was death standing outside, waiting for me." The third anecdote is a droll duet, Eva Dahlbeck like an ironclad Judy Holliday with Gunnar Björnstrand in a stalled elevator. Acerbic smile contemplates squashed top hat, and suddenly the suspended box crystallizes matrimonial cooperation and suffocation. (The Exterminating Angel would balloon the sketch of rumpled gala clothes into a full revue.) "Religion and grandchildren" comprise here the ultimate sentence for wives, though Bergman lets them off with a wink. "God's not married." With Aino Taube, Hakan Westergren, Gerd Andersson, and Björn Bjelfvenstam. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |