Or is that really what I mean? The film perhaps would have been more complex, would have penetrated deeper into the labyrinth of the personality, if it had not gone in for the complications. Because the "complications" are largely plot points that heedlessly saddle the characters with a lot of baggage they could have done without.
We should have been allowed, I think, to guess at Elliott Gould's problems, to decide intuitively about him. When we learn, rather suddenly, that he is the only male survivor of a family that was nearly eradicated by the Nazis, we aren't surprised; that was there in his character. But need we be told? Must his terribly wounded personality be explained by something as concrete as this? Isn't Bergman depending on the same sort of pat "character motivation" that he's usually at pains to avoid?
And isn't it an example of overkill when the woman becomes pregnant - perhaps by him - and leaves her husband and flies to London to seek him, after he's left her, only to discover that both his sister and himself suffer from a nerve disorder that may be hereditary? How much does Bergman have to lie on? Do we need historical or medical clues to this character? Can't we understand him as the woman does, intuitively?
For she does. The wonder of "The Touch" is that the Bibi Anderson performance remains untouched by Bergman's meddlesome plot. Her performance is exactly right, which of course serves to underline the weaknesses of the Bergman story. Her relationship with both men in the film is so full, so fragile and so human that we're almost angry at Bergman for bringing in the Nazis and rare diseases. We want to stay inside these people because it is possible, after all, that love and hatred can be created entirely within the personality. They usually are. And what filmmaker knows that better than Ingmar Bergman?
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