Bergman – A Year In A Life

This is an honest portrait of Ingmar Bergman in the pivotal year of 1957 (though it covers his entire life and career). It captures him as the tender and prickly, effusive, demon-driven, tyrannical and half-crazy celebrity-genius he was: a man so consumed by work, and by his obsessive relationships with women, that he seemed to be carrying on three lives at once. Yet in 1957, all of that force came together. It was about Bergman’s hunger and genius, his insane lust for life, the stories he needed to tell, and about something else — a moment in the 20th century when a great many people got hooked on films that turned the darkness of our hidden hearts into drama that scalded and cleansed you. Magnusson assembles a mighty cast of international admirers and colleagues, including Liv Ullmann, Roy Andersson, Lars von Trier and Zhang Yimou – and, though not Bergman’s most influential American fan, Woody Allen. A valuable reminder of greatness.