To Joy

Early Bergman is interesting. With the great silent film director Victor Sjosstrom as his mentor, Bergman gained a strong visual sense early. With his love of and background in theater, he was able to get strong performances out of his actors pretty much out of the gate. However, while most of what I’ve seen of his early work contains scenes with sharp as a knife writing and biting performances, there’s often something missing in the larger sense.

To Joy was made in 1950 and was Bergman’s eighth film as director. Of the early work I’ve seen, it’s pretty hit or miss. Crisis is outright bad, but A Ship to India is rather good (not the masterpiece Bergman boasted it was upon its release). To Joy falls in between. I wanted to like it more than I did, but there are some larger elements that I don’t think get quite the support that they should.

First, the movie feels like a first draft of Scenes from a Marriage, Bergman’s fantastic television miniseries about a couple who marry, divorce, and reunite over several years. I don’t want to say that the way to fix To Joy is to add three and a half hours and get it to the length of the miniseries, but I do think that all it really needs is more time.

The movie is the story of a couple’s relationship as they fall into love, marry, separate after having two children, and then fall back in love again only to have the relationship torn apart again by the wife’s death, along with one of the two children. There are individual scenes that, taken out of context, feel like they should hit me emotionally pretty powerfully, but the problem is that by the time we get to those scenes, we don’t have a strong enough sense of the relationship as a whole. To see the two begin to rend apart is muted by the fact that we never really saw them terribly happy before that point. I really feel like an extra half hour where we saw the two in a more “normal” state before things flew apart would make the ultimate destruction of the relationship impact more deeply.

I think this is best emphasized by the final scene. Throughout the movie, Bergman had used the couple’s careers as musicians in an orchestra to help not only score the film, but underline the conflict of emotions at given moments. The final scene is the husband playing the Ode to Joy in the orchestra with great emotion to an audience of one, his son, the last of his family. Again, out of context, it feels quite powerful, but the son has had once quick scene up to that point. I had to think about who the little boy was for a moment before I remembered him, despite there being only one little boy in the movie. There was no connection between me and the boy, or between the boy and his father. It really undermined the power of the scene, which had the husband playing this joyful music to images of his deceased wife and their most unpleasant moments. It should have worked better than it did.

But, as I said, Bergman’s filmmaking at this point was refined and rather wonderful. His mise en scene, particularly in his conversations where he kept both faces in frame and in focus as much as possible, is really strong. His camera work is almost elegant in its movements. And his use of the music through the story is very well done. I just wish the movie had filled out the earlier parts of the relationship more, and given us more time with the children to feel for them as part of the equation of the relationship.