INGRID BERGMAN: IN HER OWN WORDS (Stig Björkman) Some subtitles. 114 minutes. See listing. Rating: NNN
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words is exactly that – a reconstructed memoir matching archival footage, much of it shot by Bergman herself, with recollections by the Oscar-winning actor and legend, read aloud (in Swedish) by Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina, The Danish Girl).
Director Stig Björkman employs a format similar to Stevan Riley’s Listen To Me Marlon and Asif Kapadia’s Amy, recontextualizing diary entries and letters to allow his subject to tell her own story. But this film doesn’t pack the same punch as those others.
Björkman is content to take Bergman at her word, refusing to examine her personal and professional choices any more closely than she did. Although he includes plenty of behind-the-scenes material, like early camera and costume tests that show a young woman as strikingly composed as she is hauntingly photogenic, there’s almost no discussion of her methods as an actor or her thoughts on her performances.
Her personal life, represented here as a whirlwind succession of marriages, is treated with the utmost delicacy. Bergman rhapsodizes over a new lover, we see a few quick, happy images, and then it’s on to the next one.
If you just want to see Bergman mugging for her own camera or clowning around with legendary collaborators like Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman, this movie has that. But Björkman could have gone deeper and found so much more.
