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The Touch
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Films that begin, abruptly and disconcertingly, with the
death of a parent have a special, almost mythological force.
Three such films come to mind: John Cassavetes’
sublime Gloria (1980), in which a
little boy hears his entire family being blasted to death in a neighbouring
apartment; Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Luna (1979), where a
teenage boy’s stepfather disappears at the point of a sudden heart attack; and The Touch, in which the adult Karin
(Bibi Andersson) arrives at hospital 15 minutes after her mother has passed
away.
Ingmar Bergman (who based this opening on a similar,
real incident of ‘bad timing’) conveys the desolating effect of this event via
a simple but extraordinary figure of style: the positioning of the central
figure against a completely bare wall. This image (which today conjures the
cinema of Philippe Garrel)
will recur throughout The Touch, and
every time it has the effect of a tabula
rasa, a stripping-away of story and place, a return to ground zero.
Before this moment, the film has set out in a
direction uncommon in Bergman: everyday life, natural colour, mundane movements
of driving, parking, walking, a banal atmospheric soundscape. This sets the
pattern of the work: each time we approach what seems like a familiar station
of quotidian realism, we are wrenched away from it – plunged, instead, into
comical irony (such as the dysfunctional use of a vacuum cleaner), or stark
morbidity.
Likewise, intertwined with that, every time we think
we have arrived at the scene of a universal human soap opera (the Eternal
Triangle, no less), we are disconcertingly lost in ambiguities, ellipses, a
sudden passage to abstraction, or what might seem overwrought symbolism or
metaphor.
But The Touch is not a film you can just “read out” or decode symbolically and thematically.
(Karin comes back into frame – not once but twice across the film! – to gaze at
an covered runestone of Angarn church that goads with its fascinating design,
enigmatic inscription, and completely ordinary memorial significance.) It’s
truly a work of figuration – less
drama than dramatic essay, less representation than a probing of
representability, less storytelling than an arrangement of optional, notional
scenes that might or might not add up to a coherent story. (We never know, for
example, when characters are telling the truth or lying, spinning a story – and
this creates an enormous hole when we arrive, for example, at an extremely mysterious
brother/sister relation.) Persona (1966) had already well and truly broken this ground, but in an obviously modernist, iconoclastic fashion. In The Touch these things proceed in a more disguised, even cryptic way.
I find it to be one of Bergman’s most radical films on
this level – a subtle level, it seems, since so few “get it” in that way
(whereas they have no problem grasping such figuration in, say, Pedro Costa,
where the method is so pronounced and underlined). It’s not an empty or merely
formal abstraction, either – the kind of calligraphic “parametric play” we get,
for instance, laid over the text of Marguerite Duras’ Suzanna Andler (2020) by Benoît Jacquot.
The Touch’s opening shock announces its
deepest subject. Karin has just lost a mother; as she herself is a mother of
two children, she must now, as it were, fully step forward to fill that role,
that outline. But she must also be a mother to her lover, the difficult David
(Elliot Gould) – they often fall into iconic poses where he is nestled in her
breasts or cradled in her lap as she comforts him. And, in the course of things,
Karin will also become pregnant.
At the film’s core is the discovered statue of a
Madonna – later found to contain thousands of bugs of an extinct species, now
awoken and eating away this effigy from within. It will crumble to dust at any
moment – a moment we won’t see, among the many things we don’t see, and cannot
verify, here.
Mother: an impossible place to inhabit. The Touch is devoted to the agony of
that impossibility for Karin – for anyone. Cinema – Garrel is again, the modern
touchstone – has sometimes offered us insight into the melancholia of an adult
man suddenly bereft of a father, caught between the twin chimera of his
yet-to-arrive maturity and his lost, childhood innocence. Screen comedy has
very often played with men’s inability to live up to the masculine ideal (see The Pirate, 1948). But it’s much rarer, even within the
genre of melodrama, to see this “existential” crisis played out, with such
strength and insight, in relation to a woman and the culturally all-pervasive
figure of the mother.
Why is Bergman drawn, in the first place, to the
ordinariness of the situation (and the initial style of naturalistic
presentation) in The Touch, and to
the all-too-familiar premise of Karin’s marital infidelity? It’s the same
question posed for François Truffaut when he made The Soft Skin (1964) and The Woman Next Door (1981).
Perhaps, in Bergman’s case, because it was something he so often usually fled
for the sake of his own, inimitable brand of either rarefied histrionics or
stylised, operatic comedy. Bergman works well with a certain high-art type of
melodrama. His more modernist tendency also eschews the everyday: Scenes from a Marriage (1973) presents
only the highest and lowest points of its featured relationship, crammed
suffocatingly into a televisual frame. Faithless (2000), directed by Liv Ullmann from Bergman’s script, offers the same deal.
But in The Touch Bergman faces the ordinary head-on, or at least tries to – and the film is the
record of that attempt, that essaying. Max von Sydow as Karin’s husband,
Andreas, is the solid, stolid pole of (relatively) unchanging everydayness in
this tale – and Bergman offers a touching portrait of his difficult dilemma, in
relatively conventional dramatic terms. But that’s a sidelong, passing regard,
not the agonised (and agonising) core of the project.
Everything Sven Nykvist’s camera glances at in this
realm of the everyday veers off instantly into mediated traces, clichés of the
good life, domestic bliss: this Real cannot be photographed, cannot be grasped
or touched. On this level, The Touch joins hands with another prime, disconcerting essay-drama of the 1960s, Agnès
Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) – where
happiness, like motherhood, is a floating image, figure, myth, a dream that
Varda and her characters tremblingly inhabit; another film of strange ellipses
and ambiguities in the guise of just one more tale of infidelity.
I did not want to hit off this piece by fencing with The Touch’s bad critical reputation, or
the frightfully low place it holds in its maker’s own
memoirs. None of that matters. Personally, it is a film I have held dear since
first seeing it on television in the 1970s, when I was still a young teenager:
something of the shock of its elements and their arrangement communicated
itself to me even then, in a truncated aspect ratio and with rude ad breaks,
presented as sleazy erotica on a late-night slot by host Chelsea Brown.
All the nonsense that has flown around for 50 years
about Bergman being unable to make a film in English (Michelangelo Antonioni
had to endure this indignity, too), that Gould’s American acting style escaped
his control, that the tone is misjudged and the story below par for such an
auteur … it all misses the genuine risk, the true exploration at the heart of The Touch.
MORE Bergman: Summer with Monika, The Seventh Seal © Adrian Martin June 2022 |
