THE PASSION OF ANNA Movie Review

A Passion

Ingmar Bergman's film is a complex psychological drama about four people alone on an isolated island. Max von Sydow is an ex-convict living a hermit's existence when he becomes involved with a widow (Liv Ullmann) and her friends (Erland Josephson and wife Bibi Andersson), all of whom have secrets in their past that they would prefer to conceal. Exquisitely photographed in color by Sven Nykvist, The Passion of Anna (its somewhat exploitative and misleading American title; the original was A Passion) is another of Bergman's examinations of human isolation and loneliness, photographed on Bergman's secluded and symbolically rich island home, Fårö. (The following year, Bergman would make a documentary about the island.) Though the specific characters change from film to film in Bergman's work from the mid 1950s onward, they will often share names with earlier characters; in this film, an opening narration informs us that “This time, his name (literally, von Sydow's, but more to the point, the director's alter ego) was Winkelman.” The couple played by Andersson and Josephson have the name Vergerus, which was the name of the skeptical medical officer who performed an autopsy on a body he thought was von Sydow's in Bergman's The Magician. This is one of Bergman's most emotionally violent yet accessible films of the period—it followed his extraordinary examination of human behavior in wartime, Shame, also filmed on Fårö.

NEXT STOP … Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence

1970 (R) 101 m/C SW Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell; D: Ingmar Bergman; W: Ingmar Bergman; C: Sven Nykvist. National Society of Film Critics Awards ‘70: Best Director (Bergman). VHS MGM, BTV