Featuring a treasure trove of home movies and Alicia Vikander reading aloud from letters home and childhood diaries, this is an engrossing and intimate documentary study of the Swedish-born Hollywood icon Ingrid Bergman. It retells the story of how vengefully she was treated by Hollywood and the American press when news broke in 1950 that she was leaving her husband for Italian director Roberto Rossellini – causing a kind of re-exile in Europe, and work with Rossellini, Jean Renoir and Ingmar Bergman.
Director Stig Björkman also interviews her children – including Pia Lindström from her first marriage to surgeon Petter Lindström, and of course Isabella Rossellini. He coolly juxtaposes Super 8 home movies with the simple fact that Bergman was mostly away from her family filming and, when her marriages ended, was more than content to let ex-husbands have custody of the children. Yet these children speak of her with nothing but love.
So why did Hollywood turn on Bergman quite so spitefully? In an era of buttoned-up hypocrisy and conformism, Hollywood perhaps could not tolerate a woman confidently rejecting these norms – a foreigner, what’s more. There is extraordinary footage of TV host Ed Sullivan cravenly asking his viewers to vote on whether she should be allowed on the show. There are no clips of her on it, so clearly the answer was no.
Ingrid Bergman’s unique beauty, ageing fascinatingly and gracefully in closeup, is utterly beguiling.
