Sunday, July 29, 2012

A Ship Bound for India (1947)

Nordisk Tonefilm (Sweden)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
My rating: 3 stars out of 4
IMDb
(YouTube)

A sea captain returns home after a long voyage. He finds his old girlfriend in a bedroom, deeply depressed. In a long flashback that takes up most of the film, we learn their history. Seven years ago, the sea captain's father ran a salvage operation in a Swedish coastal town. A medical condition is causing him to go blind, so he decides to leave his wife for a floozy from the local rundown burlesque theater. She ends up falling in love with his son instead. The melodramatic plot might be written off if it weren't populated by complex, well-drawn characters. The father lives in constant anxiety over his impending blindness, the son is dealing with a "hump back" and its impact on his self-confidence, the wife is afraid of getting old and being alone while the girl at the center of it all has issues of her own. Bergman manages to not only balance all of  these characters, but make us care what happens to them. This may not be prime Bergman, but it is unmistakeably Bergman.

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