The Passion of Anna Poster

The Passion of Anna (1969)

Drama  
Rayting:   7.8/10 8.6K votes
Country: Sweden
Language: Swedish
Release date: 10 November 1969

A recently divorced man meets an emotionally devastated widow and they begin a love affair.

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User Reviews

tobiasn 12 June 2002

First the bad stuff .. 'Passion' has all the earmarks of a botched production: intercut in the film are interviews with the 4 leads. These seem to have been an afterthought. .. There is also a crucial missing sequence: the beginning of the romance between Andreas and Anna seems to have been cut out! Anna's later dream sequence does not look integral to the movie. Was it added later to make up for the missing running time? ... Not to mention the sub-plot involving the mysterious crimes on the island. I suggest the original script might have fleshed this part out more.

Of the four leads, the protagonist is the weakest characterization. The director has Andreas (Max Von Sydow) constantly nailing things and carrying buckets - to show what a phlegmatic man he is . In contrast, Andreas' acquaintance, the despicable architect Elis (Erland Josephson) is the best characterized .. When both Andreas and Eva (Bibi Andersson) say they say they really like the architect, it is almost as if they 'really' mean they admire the role and how Josephson plays it. The movie is that abstracted.

There is a 5-minute sequence near the end that is incongruent and pretentious, even for Bergman. ... not too far after that we get the the climax of the film - where Andreas and Anna reveal their 'real' attitudes to each other. This sequence is a bit confusing. When you think about it later, you realize how it was incompletely prepared.

More generally the movie needed to fuse the 4 leads into the island life better. Non-Swedes probably wont fully understand the quick rendering of the secondary characters. It would help the movie get out of its narcissistic tendencies if we learned what other island residents really thought of the 4, rather than always their navel-gazing.

Now the good stuff .. as botched as it is, this movie does not deserve less than 7 stars. The talent involved in this production are almost in a different league than everyone else in the history of the movie business. The acting is so good, and the underlying concept so honest that Bergman/Nyquist most times can just leave the camera on the actors in a way Hollywood productions can only dream about. And I say this as someone who does not usually like art-house type movies.

The concept is also original, non-misogynistically portraying a woman character as possibly an unconscious murderer, as a liar who loves truth.... some of the sequences are both cinematic and perfectly subtle in the Bergman style ... Nykvist's camera-work is excellent as always ... As other people have said, the exceptional final sequence - which illustrates Von Sydow's characters fate - is both profound and amusing.

fedor8 4 January 2007

Fmovies: A writer lives on a remote island and occasionally shouts in the woods when he gets drunk. Oh, and he likes to talk to the camera, but as himself – Max von Sydow. He is friendly with an architect – with whose wife he, naturally, has sex. And let's not forget Ullmann, the widow. He likes her, too, and they hook up – much to his regret. She turns out to be even more mentally unstable than himself. In-between all the dull, pretentious dialog we have a couple of animals getting tortured and slaughtered.

Seriously now, if you like Bergman's static, depressive, and overly self-indulgent movies, watch this one, too, and have a ball. And afterward, you can take that whole bottle of sleeping pills you hide from your spouse/parents/whomever, or you can just lock the door of your bathroom and have a nice lie down in the bath-tub while you slit your wrists. I hear hanging is pretty good, too! I have seen 7 or 8 Bergman films so far, and I have yet to come across one that can even fulfill the criteria needed for being average. They are mediocre, at best. I know, I know… Those of you who love Bergman probably think that I don't possess the necessary intellect to comprehend his films. I mean, they are all, after all, simply BRILLIANT. So DEEP. So very DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND… Believe me, there is nothing difficult in these films, and I am referring in particular to his relationship films of the "Passion of Anne" kind (or "Cries & Whispers" and "Autumn Sonata", for example). They are rather simple, in fact. Sure, they may be tough to understand by your average Steven Segall fan, but the fact that Bergman's films aren't idiotic doesn't mean they're good. They do not entertain. Heavy drama? Fine. But let's have grander themes than just relationships between a couple of depressed, troubled Swedes. All that these bergmannesque Scandinavian characters need is a nice trip to Hawaii - you know, somewhere warm and sunny – and they wouldn't be on the verge of suicide so much. I NEED SOMETHING GRANDER THAN WHO IS DEPPRESSED AND WHY AND WHAT THE REAL ROOTS ARE TO THEIR ANXIETY, SELF-LOATHING, and other wonderful traits. You want deep? Check out "Possible Worlds", "2001", "Picnic At Hanging Rock", "Solaris" (the 1973 film, not the shoddy Soderbergh version), or "Stalker". Don't bore me with "why does so and so not love his missus any more and why her childhood has scarred her and hence still influences the course of their marriage" type of trite stuff. YAWN. Bergman dramas are like daily TV soapers but with better acting and dialog.

Sweden's best exports remain ABBA,their tennis players, and "Muppet Show's" Swedish Chef. I don't think that Bergman's contribution amounts to much – unless you'd take seriously what a plethora of pretentious film critics say about him.

Did I mention that Swedish is a beautiful, melodious language that is like a mermaid's song to my ears?

If you are unhappy with with this movie, which you must be, just google "Vjetropev Bergman Spoofs" and this will lead you to my video clips with the vastly improved version of the film. Have fun.

ian_harris 3 June 2003

Bergman really was at the top of his game by the late 1960's and this masterful piece is one of his (many) great works.

He has some of his best actors at his disposal: Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow. They are all superb in this film.

Key themes include "living a lie", the many ways in which love can manifest itself, man's inhumanity to man and our ability to be cruel to animals as well as each other. People who get especially upset at images of cruelty to animals might best keep away from this movie, although those scenes are done very sensitively.

The film is interspersed with post modernist vignettes by the main actors explaining how they feel about their characters. While I found those scenes fascinating, they did interrupt the flow a little and I found myself needing some time after each interruption to rejoin the lost and lonely world on that remote island.

But the criticisms are minor. The heaps of praise are my main comments on this film. I was transfixed by it. As usual with Bergman, action junkies should stay away, but lovers of great and thoughtful drama should get a lot of pleasure from this great film.

fwmurnau 10 May 2006

The Passion of Anna fmovies. Ingmar Bergman's talent and importance are not in question, but now that we can look back on his career as a whole, it's clear that not all his films are equally inspired.

THE PASSION OF ANNA is so beautifully acted and photographed, it almost disguises the emptiness at the center. Not only the characters, but the filmmaker himself seems tired, discouraged, uncertain of what he wants to say.

It's hard to be bored watching such fine actors work, but the story they're acting doesn't add up to much. Lacking inspiration, Bergman falls back on his customary verbosity and adds morbid touches, such as the unpleasant scenes of animal cruelty here, or Andreas and Anna watching on television a filmed execution in Viet Nam or somewhere, that seem to have no purpose other than arousing revulsion in the viewer.

Bergman's concentration on the cruel and the depressing almost to the exclusion of every other aspect of life must have seemed fresh and daring in the 1960s and 1970s, but now he can seem almost adolescent in his obsession with the morbid. Samuel Beckett's plays, chic during the same era, have not dated well either. There's a lot more to life, and to art, than cruelty, suffering, and death, but you'd never know it from Beckett or from Bergman films such as this one.

In an interview excerpted in the special features, Bergman says art must be useful, otherwise "we can all go to hell". It's very hard to say what the use of a film like this might be, except to make audiences weary and depressed.

Dark works which illuminate the human spirit can be valuable (O'Neill's incredibly depressing, but richly rewarding LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT is an example) but sometimes Bergman seems to have had a contract to make a film and not a lot to say. Still, everyone was being paid, the distributor required a film to be made and delivered, and it was.

One can feel Bergman using a variety of techniques in this film to find meaning in his story -- voice-over narration, improvisation, breaking the fourth wall to interview the actors about their roles -- but one senses he never really does. The film is obviously the work of a highly intelligent and talented writer/filmmaker, but it never really pays off. Viewing it is sometimes painful, sometimes boring, but rarely illuminating.

I feel the same way about CRIES AND WHISPERS, an unpleasant and, to my mind, pointless film rated very highly by others. Both CRIES and ANNA are cruel films, cold at the center. Bergman's lack of compassion seemed terribly modern, honest, and "truthful" in 1969, but now it looks more and more like a deficiency in the filmmaker's own sensibility.

peterkettle-904-444717 10 April 2014

Ingmar Bergman's 'The Passion Of Anna', seemed a masterpiece when I first saw it, in 1969, in an art house cinema in London, on my own. That intense experience overwhelmed me, and has remained in my head, although I have never seen it again until today. It is still powerful. The underlying menace, metaphorically epitomised by animal abuses outside, in grim weather, is reflected by the inside scenes. Andreas, a sophisticated 'outsider' - Max Von Sydow, troubled by divorce, no money and with a ravaged sense of failure and inadequacy - links up with a highly successful architect and his wife. The opening shot of Andreas on a rooftop, ineffectually repairing some ridge tiles, is a portent of his impracticality. The interiors are intimately photographed, in dramatic contrast to the island shots, where Nykvist gives us a broader view. There is a trapped sense of an intellectual but isolated group who can cope no better with life than the people who live permanently on the island. Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson have their own conflicts and inner turmoils; Erland plays Elis the architect, and reveals the classic dilemma of the successful man. He has converted a windmill just to store his photographs. Hundreds of white boxes on shelves classified as emotions, catastrophes, violence; they have no real purpose, he says. He cannot allow his knowledge of human frailties to cloud his mind so he externalises his concerns, storing them safely away. Andreas can only be a solitary part of their world, and he tries to make something happen with Liv Ullman, but that ends in bitterness. The players circle around each other, all questing for something. The arty inserts, where interviews with the actors intrude on the narrative, either irritates or helps; at the time it seemed so innovative but I am now not so convinced it is a good idea. The film is still modern though. In the late 60s it seemed utterly new. The final scene is moving and unnerving. Andreas is abandoned, alone again, pacing up and down, going over the same ground, locked in a doomed circularity. We all have these people in us.

zolaaar 19 January 2010

I think, En passion is indeed not a perfect film, but who likes perfection? In fact, I think, up to now, it belongs in Bergman's top 10 and is a great addition to the issues argued in Vargtimmen, Skammen and Rite. All these characters here are not really authentic, but one: Verner, the old man suspected by the villagers on that island to be the animal abuser, and therefore excruciated. Everyone else, including Andreas, Anna and the couple they are friends with, are people who call for problems, get entrapped by them and catapult themselves into an almost-catastrophe. It's interesting that Verner, writes to Andreas, who seems to be the worst of all, i.e. most un-authentic, a suicide note, saying: "I can't look into anyone's eyes anymore", is, to my understanding, the key to the film - self-made problems contrasted with problems created externally. Given Verner's suicide, driven by slander and torture, Andreas' and Anna's issues in their relationship fade, normally, but then an axe gets involved, a stable burns down and a horse runs off, ablazed, kindled by the real animal tormentor who still is on the loose. An inferno.

What I like most about this film, though, is its situational context: the island. I can't think of another Bergman film where the environment plays a bigger role than here. All figures are moving in a lost, iced vastness, in defoliated, sparse woods, get stuck in morass and dirt. Animals get brutally tortured and killed, wood gets chopped, wagons bog down in mud. The forlornness and menace of the people in nature is wonderfully captured by Nykvist, mostly in long, high-angle or panoramic shots and is an intriguing contrast to the interior (of the cottages, where the talking, cheating and fighting takes place) - inside there lurks the psychic, outside there's the physical death. That is a great imagery. However, I'm not satisfied with these interview snippets which I think is a nice idea (such as Bergman's verbal directions in the off in Vargtimmen), but it's executed quite poorly.

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