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The Touch - Beröringen (1971)
Synopsis
The significance of the Swedish Film Institute’s newly-minted restoration of Ingmar Bergman’s The Touch – at a time when the director’s work is enjoying one of its periodic re-appraisals – is that the film was a US-Swedish co-production with dialogue originally in Swedish as well as English, as appropriate.
Unfortunately, this version has long been unavailable, supplanted by prints in which Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson illogically talk to each other in English.
This has looked particularly ludicrous when the film has been aired on Swedish TV. With the original soundtrack lost somewhere in LA, the SFI resorted to its own uniquely surviving distribution print and a 16mm copy in Bergman’s own private collection to resurrect the authentic track. Is it worth it? Well, of course.
A story of human relationships told with great intimacy and sensitivity, The Touch centres on Anna (Andersson), a middle-class Swedish housewife with a busy husband (von Sydow), who has an affair with a stimulating but neurotic and slightly oafish archaeologist, David (Elliott Gould). She thinks she can keep them both.
‘It is possible to live two lives and slowly combine them in one good, wise life,’ she says to David, but she pays the penalty of leading a double life…
This complex triangle is acted out with superb skill and subtlety by the three principals, and with the film’s integrity now re-instated by Sweden’s archivists, The Touch stands out as a major work of Bergman’s mature years. --bfi
Cast: Bibi Andersson, Elliott Gould, Max von Sydow, Sheila Reid, Margareta Byström
London (Treasures from the Archives), Berlinale (Retrospective)
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About this movie
Title: The Touch - Beröringen (1971)
Directed by: Ingmar Bergman
Date of birth: 14 July 1918, Uppsala, Uppland, Sweden
Date of death: 30 July 2007, Fårö, Sweden
Writing credits: Ingmar Bergman
Music: Carl Michael Bellman
Year: 1971
Country: United States | Sweden
Language: Swedish | English
Color: Black & White
Runtime: 115 min.
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