Deadly Dance

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES

Directed and Written by Ingmar Bergman

In the prologue, Peter (Robert Atzorn), a man of respectable dress, manner and background, murders a prostitute. In the epilogue he is seen in his asylum cell, having completed his descent from inexplicable behavior to full-scale madness. Between these two sequences, Peter, his wife Katarina (Christine Buchegger) and various friends and relatives speculate on what must have motivated him to murder a stranger. They reach few firm conclusions.

In fact, these people with their sometimes boring, occasionally self-serving ruminations and reminiscences are not characters in the conventional sense. They are instruments through which Ingmar Bergman, employing the device of an "investigator," who is mostly an offscreen voice, contemplates an enigma much larger than the causes of a sordid crime. What he is meditating upon is nothing less than the fundamental unknowability of the human soul.

Peter's mother shows in her testimony and behavior that as a child he was deprived of self-reliance by her smothering attentions. His wife's evidence--supported by his own dreams and memories--reveals that what seemed a marriage of near exemplary closeness was actually a case of almost childlike mutual dependency. A psychiatrist insists that men kill because it is only through murder that one can totally possess another. He warns that Peter must now be regarded as a potential suicide because, having murdered his wife's surrogate in an enactment of possessive passion, he must now kill himself in order finally to possess himself as well.

Ingmar Bergman is nothing if not thorough when he sets about one of his psychological workups, and his title here hints at deeper conclusions than most of his characters reach on the subject that they ponder. If they are "marionettes," then it follows that they are controlled by invisible strings, by forces that the individual himself cannot perceive and that must elude even wise analysis. If this is so, then the whole effort to possess someone else, even in the radical way that Peter used, is absurd, as is the effort to understand it in conventional moral and emotional terms.

Bergman makes himself very clear on this point in two monologues delivered by Tim, a man who appears, at first, to be a peripheral character. He is Katarina's homosexual business partner, who introduced the murderer to his victim, and who, in examining his motive for so doing, discovers that the strings that moved him are far too tangled for rational explanation. In these arias an actor named Walter Schmidinger does protean work. The rest of the cast is excellent too, but because Tim is the only one who fully grasps Bergman's philosophical idea, he is the only one who can express a full range of free, unpuzzled emotions. His wisdom, compassion and anguish briefly quicken and warm a bleak film that is more interesting to analyze than to attend; for the fact is that Bergman has set himself a most formidable artistic task in this film. Marionettes, obviously, are less than human--the dead playthings, in Bergman's scheme of things, of a dead God. The great director's mood as he contemplates their dance is both clinical and wintry. If he has failed, in the end, to jerk his dolls into a fully convincing imitation of life, one cannot help responding to the bracing demands of the severe intelligence manipulating them.

--By Richard Schickel

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