The Touch (1971)
6/10
A muddled adultery story
14 January 2023
My favorite scene in The Touch was at the beginning, when a woman (Bibi Andersson) arrives at a hospital and is told her mother has passed away. She enters the room, and sees her mother lying there peacefully, with traffic noises audible through an open window. She enters the room and her eyes survey the scene. Her mother's eyes are still open, as if still looking out the window. We can only imagine what she was seeing in her last moments, or thinking about. There is a tight shot of her hands, adorned with wedding bands, then a close-up of her face. She was once in love and married, those rings were slipped onto her fingers and were there all these decades. As morbid as it sounds, we wonder if they should be taken off and held onto. Through the window, a double-decker bus pulls up to a stop, and we realize that of course, life goes on, oblivious to this little scene. There are shots of the medical equipment that was used to keep her alive, now no longer turned on. Her daughter sees the clock on the nightstand - 5 minutes to 3:00 - still ticking away. Next, photos of children, who we'll latter see are her own children, and her mother's grandchildren. Then a water glass, still half-full, and her glasses. When she last used these objects, did her mother know it would be the last time? She approaches the body, touches her hands, strokes her hair, and embraces her, then draws back and leaves, after a brief backward glance. I found the economy in this scene and how much it conveyed without words or dramatic affectation simply brilliant.

Unfortunately, this has little to do with the rest of the film, which is about the woman having an affair with a visiting archaeologist (Elliott Gould). Not surprisingly, her life is soon all tangled up, like that the ancient runestone of the knotted up snake she happens across while visiting the site he's working at. Her husband (Max von Sydow) works too hard but when he catches on he's quite stoic about it, not lashing out at either of them and simply telling her lover that his wife must choose. She's in the next room of the apartment listening in, mind you. There's something quite nice in the treatment of Andersson's character, who is not only not judged, but is also empowered.

Adultery stories are as old as the hills, and while this one is elevated by Andersson's charm and von Sydow's restraint, ultimately it falls short because of a lackluster script. How the archaeologist acts comes across is more than a little affected, careening between bold flirtation (telling her husband he'd like to see travel photos of her nude during a slideshow), impotence during their first encounter, later tortured and angry while screwing her, hitting her out of frustration when she arrives late another time, and a little bit of tenderness. I can't really fault Gould as some critics did, I just think Bergman tried to get in too much angst and it was in some rather heavy-handed ways, making the passion of the affair ring false. As he put it in 1994, "The story I bungled so badly was based on something extremely personal to me: the secret life of someone who loves becomes gradually the only real life and the real life becomes an illusion."
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