Port of Call

Berit's been punished and reformed, by those so much better and informed, now she's open eyed, attempts suicide, just can't fit the ideal they want formed (girls just want to have fun).

Gosta won't go sailing anymore, seeks the sanctuary of being on the shore, he's met a nice lady, who's past's a bit shady, unsure if that's where he wants to moor (the lost soul who doesn't know what he wants).

You're not like us, so we're going to make you like us. The oppressive approaches to managing adolescents who don't subscribe to the images society demands and expects, magnificently performed and presented - makes you so happy you're alive today and not then.

After making it through many of the more well-known Ingmar Bergman films, I've turned my attention to early Bergman. This Ingmar Bergman retrospective has certainly been the one with the loosest viewing schedule, which isn't to the project's detriment. With a filmmaker like Ingmar Bergman, one with pronounced themes to his films, it is interesting to see how he carries out those themes in each period of his work. In his 1948 film, Port of Call, Bergman examined the intricacies of human existence through the eyes of a suicidal factory worker desperate to escape the weight of her overbearing mother. Starring Nine-Christine Jönsson and Bengt Eklund, Ingmar Bergman perfectly explores the struggle of living a life free of the strains of complicated human relationships and the prisons of our own minds that many are often unable to escape from.

Berit (Nine-Christine Jönsson) recently released from reformatory school following an attempted suicide, is back under the thumb of her manipulative and overbearing mother. She sees a way out when she meets Gösta, a man she is able to convince is the first one to experience her passions. Berit, unable to properly experience love, sees Gösta as, not only a way to break free from her mother's influence, but also to escape her laborious job at the factory. A marriage would also prove to Berit's social worker that Berit was establishing a stable foundation for herself and would be free from the threat of returning to the reformatory school. Her plans for freedom with Gösta are foiled, however, when he cannot forgive her past.

Family troubles, especially overbearing or neglectful parents are a constant theme in the films of Ingmar Bergman and apparently have been since his earliest features. The intricacies of familial disconnect are fascinating, and Bergman tunes into those intricacies in a way I have seldom seem from other filmmakers. One of my favorite aspects of Bergman films is how he illustrates the brokenness of people, and how that brokenness contributes to their inabilities to form successful relationships. I continue to be amazed how keenly Bergman tapped into the human spirit. Another mainstay in Bergman's filmography is how often he depicted people working jobs they don't like in order to maintain lives that were personally unfulfilling. Much like in Summer with Monika, our protagonists in Port of Call worked jobs that robbed them of their essential human fulfillment and left them in a constant state of emotional exhaustion. The only place to relieve the stresses of the world is in the cinema. The scene in which Berit has removed herself from every disappointment of existence when she is freely laughing in a crowded theatre was extraordinary. It reminded me of the scene in Louis Malle's Au revoir Les Enfants where the only place everyone was equal and could enjoy themselves was during a screening of Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant. Cinema as an artistic medium has relieved the pressures of existence since its inception, and Ingmar Bergman films are no exception to this rule.

Berit is a factory girl fresh out of reformatory school and fresh from an attempted suicide by drowning when she meets a sailor named Gösta at a dance club. He beds her down that night, and later, when the two become lovers, allows himself to assume that he was the first man to do so. Meanwhile, Berit is desperate to be free: free from the badgering and manipulation of the mother she is forced to live with, free of the dirty work of the factory and free of her social worker and the constant threat of returning to reformatory school. Her already unhappy life is complicated when an old friend from the school desperately needs her help.

Personal freedom is a major theme of this lovely, bleak, but not pessimistic, early Ingmar Bergman movie. We yearn for Berit to find freedom from her unpleasant life, and most of all freedom from loneliness, just as we hope Gösta can free himself from jealousy and the specters of long-gone rivals for his affections.

A young man gets off a boat in a harbor. Moments later, he witnesses a young woman jump off the harbor into the water in obvious despair. They don't meet, but he just watches as someone closer jumps into the water and fishes her out, leaving the young woman crying on the pavement.

Thus starts Port of Call, a movie that touches on a few familiar themes that Bergman would visit in his later movies and, for a time, gets very closer to be a special gem in his early filmography. Missteps in the film's second half, though, hamper the film and keep it from being quite good.

The two young people meet at a night club some time later and immediately hit it off, but we can see that the woman, Berit, is beset by some emotional problems while the young man, Gosta, seems, perhaps, a little too aloof for something like a serious relationship. However, they enjoy each other's company, work through some early misunderstandings and a confrontation with a handsy foreman Berit works under that leaves Gosta bloody, and eventually decide to spend a weekend alone together. They are not married, so they pretend the relationship in order to get a room, but Berit is confronted by a figure from her past.

Berit lived in a very unhappy home growing up. Her parents hated each other, but they remained together (whenever her father wasn't at sea as a ship's first mate) in order to try and give Berit a stable home. That didn't really work and Berit ended up running away to live with a boy she hardly knew. Despite the match being remarkably happy, Berit was still underage, found, and sent to a reform house where she met Gertrude, a fellow delinquent. The two developed a common bond, if not a particular friendship, over their shared experience, and Gertrude's presence at the hotel where she works and the couple are staying, brings everything back. Berit decides to unload herself to Gosta whom she hopes will be understanding.

Gosta can't quite reconcile his feelings for Berit with her past, asking her how many men she had been with. Her looseness, of a certain variety, bothers him. The scene of the reveal is a bit awkward. On the one hand, there's a wonderful element of later Bergman as the camera focuses squarely on Berit with Gorsta in the background taking in the information. On the other hand, the film goes into a series of flashbacks that don't work that well, especially the last one that details the scene where Berit lived with another boy and his parents as the parents kicked her out. The reasons for the action we see are unclear, short, and involve three characters we've never seen before. The overall confessional would have been more effective with just Berit talking (a technique Bergman would later use much more frequently).

The scene that touches rather directly on later thematic chords from Bergman involves Gosta telling his female troubles to fellow dockworkers. One of them ends up telling him that no one else cares about the problems and only Gorsta and Birta do. This presages the silent God of Bergman's middle period, and the laser focus on relationships and those directly involved in his later period. However, the movie gets bogged down with competing ideas that get pushed on in front of another. It's not a complete failure, but it's enough of a distraction to take what had been a very promising film into something far more ordinary. Even Gertrude's death after a botched abortion feels a bit more like a distraction instead of something that feeds the central narrative.

Still, the movie shows Bergman's early promise. Performances are universally good, and the visual keys he would later use are strong as he alternates between real locations in Stockholm (similar to how he would use Faro later) to more stylized sets (evoking his later use of sets for certain films like All These Women). It's almost good, but not quite.

For viewers born decades after the end of the second worldwide conflict, it's hard to imagine anything but joy and optimism in the hearts of the younger population that went through what was probably the hardest (and certainly darkest) part of their lives. We've all basked in stories, real and fictional, that knighted those who fathered the baby-boomers with the title of the greatest generation, one whose youth was sacrificed at history's altar ... but that's overlooking their ordinariness, how modest their aims were and thus how poignantly relatable their lives could be outside the epic scope of war and other life-and-death situations.

When Ingmar Bergman "Port of Call" starts, war is way over and there's no any indication of life-threatening situations yet the film opens with a startling suicide attempt: a girl takes a big dive from a dock and many people come to rescue her, including a war veteran who just settled in the port town. From what it looks like, the two protagonists didn't benefit from the kind of existential canvases that invite for optimism: the man is a sailor back from war, disillusioned and hiding his easy-going nature behind a mask of cynicism, his name is Gösta (Bengt Eklund), the woman is a young factory girl, depressed and insecure, with the kind of troubled past that makes any romance doomed from the start, and whose roots are to be found within a tense relationship with her overbearing mother. She's Berit (Nine-Chrstine Jönsson).

Those were the neo-realism days in Europe and the noir era in the U.S.A, the film, maybe unconsciously driven by these two influences, doesn't intend to paint a glamorous romance of any kind but rather a life capsule in a small seaside working-class town, a sort of Swedish "On the Waterfront" where we follow the lives of two loners as they converged one night at a dance. It's an immediate and mutual appreciation that never feels forced nor contrived, it IS believable that the two would find oasis of serenity within each other. To use fitting metaphors, Gösta has nothing but dreams of stability, he's a boat that wants to set ashore someplace, drop the anchor once and for all, he just doesn't have a compass, Berit on the other hand is a raft drifting in the ocean of her own guilt-ridden past and has no rows whatsoever to move on.

In a way the film is more about Berit's attempt to come to term with that past of hers, it's not much a character study but a psychological journey into a mindset that made happiness as improbable as the sight of land for a boat without any guidance. Gösta is an active and passive observer who acts as a lookout sometimes and some others becomes a true rower on Berit's frail embarkation. He knows she's as tormented as he is, he doesn't care much about her past though he's clearly displeased by the constant harassment she gets from men, raising suspicions of the ugliest sorts. So, as the film moves on and their relationship thickens, more obstacles come across their journey to the promised harbor, divulgated through flashbacks, revealed secrets and a subplot involving Berit's friend Gertrud, Bibi Nelson.

The flashbacks on Berit's life are depressing and bleak: marital fights, scandals, life in reformatory school that borders on prostitution and debauchery, a difficult mother-and-daughter relationship, it's a cocktail of lurid negativity that darkens an already heavy-loaded movie and the irony is that the friend Gertrud got an even worse deal. The contrast between Berit and Gertrud is interesting on two levels: it highlights the fact that Berit is abler to fight her own demons and maybe her real tragedy is that she can't handle happiness even when served on a silver platter, as if it was a dish best served cold. The second level is that the film is a powerful social commentary on the tormented lives of women with a 'bad rep' in a system that often pose as a judge of morality, driving them to the most extreme and sometimes macabre corners.

Bergman, in one of his breakthrough movies, displays the kind of sensitivities that made he glorious days of European neo-realism, his "Port of Call" is as powerful and introspective as the Italian classics of the late 1940s through this portrayal of two lost souls who come to find a true meaning to their lives after many years of unhappiness and resentment. For that, the director shows a predisposition for lengthy intimate scenes where two faces are close to each other and one speak alone without looking at the other, as if the act of talking was individual and solitary in essence. But when Berit confesses her past to Gösta, it looks like she's talking to us; from either point of view, ours or Gösta's, you can feel the emergence of a cinematic talent and a unique ability to paint human emotions with consideration to the viewers.

The film is rather simple but it's made in such a way we feel like belonging to the screen... and that's Bergman's power, every once in a while, "Port of Call" ceases to be that gripping drama and reaches an unexpected summit of film-making showing the early signs of the genius, small moments where souls are confronted one to another, talking, deciding and acting. The tension is real and makes the few moments of relief only more rewarding. And that's an adjective I'd use to describe the ending, one that such a movie called for, after so many questioning about life, it was only fair that the two young protagonists, directed under a then-young director could find one reason to two to see the future in brighter colors, almost spoiled by the poster.