INGMAR BERGMAN

The Passion of Anna

It’s always a shame when I can’t write about these films expeditiously. I’ve mentioned it many times at this point. Life gets in the way, and, well, that’s life. It’s always a shame, but it’s especially a shame this time, because I had a lot to say about this film. I’ll try to recapture that spirit now.

Let’s start with the title. In English it’s, for some reason, “The Passion of Anna”. I don’t have any idea who named it that, but it’s a terrible translation. The original Swedish title is “En passion”, which would literally translate as “A passion.” Bergman grew up in a very religious conservative Christian family. His father was a parish minister. In Christian tradition, the passion is the suffering of Jesus. I do not believe that he named this film “A passion” without it being very much a reference. As the latin definition says, “to suffer, bear, endure”.

It’s certainly a much better description of what everyone is doing here. The character of Anna has no passion, for almost anything. Nor does anyone else. This is Bergman in his most alienated and disconnected. There is an incredible scene of a dinner party, where almost the entire thing is filmed in closeups. It feels like four people having dinner together, by themselves. At no point do you feel like anyone is with anyone else.

The entire thing is like that, and it tracks pretty closely with what was going on in Bergman’s private life at the time. He was also going through a divorce and disconnection, and it seems to have very clearly translated to the screen. Everyone is suffering. Everyone is bearing their burden. Everyone is just trundling their path forward, almost never actually engaging with anything outside of themselves. The only moments of “passion”, in the modern sense, in this entire film, are angry ones.

Anyway, I loved it. - Dec 20th, 2024