Eva

I hope this film is not as forgotten as it seems. Ingmar Bergman wrote the screenplay and Gustaf Molander directed. I do not know the latter's films at all, and only know that it was a later film in his life and as a director. ' Eva ' is a fine film if not quite a great one. It is a film that struggles with the eternal problem of why we are born to know happiness, to be worn down also by experience and for death to be the outcome. The film shows an example of a peaceful death ( these scenes alone are sublime and it is a great section of the total scenario ) and other scenes are nightmarish in their depiction of human and ultimate suffering. One is a dream and it is truly horrific surrounded as it is by two people ( Eva Dahlbeck plays the woman ) living in squalor and moral depravity. The main protagonist is a man brilliantly acted by Birger Malmsten ( an actor not appreciated enough in my opinion for his work with Bergman ) who is haunted by the fear of death, having seen it closeup and partly caused by him. No spoilers. He meets Eva, a good woman and here I felt the film fell into too much of the expected in cinema, but its saving grace is that it leads to one of the most sublime endings in any film I have seen. To describe it I refuse to do, but life and death itself is shown literally as a necessary part of being, tragic or peaceful. For this ending and its combination of words and images I give this a 10. Find a copy if you can and mine has French subtitles, but it seems to be available in the UK. As a film it is not great, but the sublime scenes make it paradoxically one of the finest ever made. And I wonder how Bergman would have directed it. I have a hunch he could not have achieved Molander in the scenes that are so perfect, or the dreadful middle part where hell in life is all too well conveyed.