JUMPING SHIP
by
Douglas Messerli
Ingmar
Bergman and Olle Länsberg (screenplay), Ingmar Bergman (director) Hamnstad (Port of Call) / 1948
Ingmar
Bergman’s 1948 film Port of Call was
his third feature. Although it does yet reveal the artistry of his later
movies, it is still a fascinating work and is well worth seeing, at times
extremely moving while pointing to several of his later concerns.
Generally, it has been described as a
neorealist work, particularly because at the end credits mention of the
director Roberto Rossellini. Yet I have always questioned most of the notions
that critics have about neorealism, arguing that, in reality, these are quite
romantically conceived films that pretend a kind of realism that Rossellini, in
particular, eventually abandoned. Certainly this film has very little
connection with someone like De Sica’s Bicycle
Thieves.
Bergman’s work, as critic David Blakeslee
suggests, may have more connections with the poetic realist French films, one of
which, Marcel Carne's film of a decade before, Port of Shadows, which is obviously hinted at in Bergman’s Hamnstad (its Swedish title which more literally
means Port Town). The gritty work was
filmed in the Swedish city of Götenberg, on Sweden’s west coast (strangely the only
Swedish city I have ever visited), and represents a world obsessed with the hard
work at the docks and of the poverty of its citizens. In the end, I might say
that Port of Call reminds me more of
the great late 19th century realist-writer Émile Zola than its mid-20th
century counterparts.
Bergman’s film, moreover, is highly
linked to the sea (after all for much of his later life the director lived on an island), and in the
film’s first few scenes we see long-time sailor Gösta
(Bengt Eklund) on his way back to port to become, once again, a land lubber;
yet at almost the very minute Gösta, symbolically speaking, “jumps” ship, he
witnesses a young woman, Berit Irene Holm (Nine-Christine Jönsson), leap into
the harbor in an apparent attempt at suicide. The young sailor has no choice,
as the hero of this piece, but to jump into the water and save her, despite her
vehement protests.
These two, we immediately perceive, will
be intrinsically intertwined. And the rest of the film, in part, is a kind of
study in how this version of Nana has come into the situation in which Gösta first encounters her.
The sailor is quite obviously a quiet
and thoughtful guy—after all in one of the first scenes he is reading the read
Swedish naturalist Harry Martinson—but in his shy demeanor he seems easily manipulated
by his friends, who offer him a bed in their small apartment, help get him a
job at the local dock, and insist that he put down the book and go out with
them dancing on Saturday night.
It is there, at the dance hall, after
being dragged around the room by a gum-chewing teenager, that he reencounters Berit,
the two of them immediately interested in each other and quickly escaping the
noisy and crowded hall.
Their relationship might almost have
moved swimmingly forward, were it not for the continued abuse of Berit’s
mother, who whenever her daughter encounters a man threatens to send her back to
reformatory school. Fortunately she has a boss in the ring factory in which she
works intervenes, freeing her, at least temporarily, from her mother’s
retribution. The pretendingly kind juvenile office is right out of a novel by Charles Dickens.
But as Berit increasingly falls in love
with her new Romeo, she becomes determined to tell her story, despite Gösta’s
suggestion that he need not hear it (“We all have a right for our own lives”), revealing
the endless battles between her father and mother throughout her childhood, her
sexual rebellion, her several years in a reform school, and other details, all
of which end up shocking the somewhat innocent would-be lover.
When a prostitute friend of Berit’s,
Gertrud (Mimi Nelson), discovers that she is pregnant, she turns to an illegal
abortionist, who feeds the girl a toxic mix of something which ends in her
death in Berit’s house, bringing the apparent "sinner" to the police once again. Disgusted with
the torridness of it all, Gösta gets drunk, hires a
prostitute, and goes nearly mad, breaking his liquor bottle against the bed and
almost abusing the woman. Ultimately, he is locked by her john into the
courtyard from which he cannot escape.
Critics have mentioned that Bergman was
later sorry for this scene, wishing he had never shot this quite melodramatic
episode. But actually it is interesting if only because Gösta himself now must
experience what Berit has for most of her life: despair, anger, and
imprisonment. He might as well now be on that pier about to slip into the waters of
death. And in this scene, moreover, we see the character playing out a theme that will
recur again and again in Bergman’s work: he is a man conscience suffering for
that very fact.
The seemingly tacked-on ending plays
that sense of “conscience” out in literal terms, as he finally tracks down
Berit again, the two possibly ready to begin the reparations between them and
their own pasts. As Blakeslee points out, if this ending seems a little too
easy, so too would have been the couple’s total separation and/or deaths. In Port of Call everything is simply open,
allowing the characters to determine their own futures, their own lives.
No, this is not Bergman at his prime,
but is a work that shows his mind brewing the many tensions between men and
women, and women and women that are at the heart of his great works.
Los Angeles, May 5,
2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (May 2019).
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