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Directed by: Ingmar Bergman

Starring: Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Lena Olin, Nadja Palmstjerna-Weiss, Bertil Guve

How many of you have waited in front of a toilet door closed on your face after an argument with your lover? Did you feel like taking control over the situation or breaking the door? Have you ever thought what brought you here? The haphazard choices that line every instance that has brought you to this moment. The endless sleepless nights you now don’t enjoy that much right now. The pain caused by several farewell embraces. The endless time wasted near the trigger of the telephone. These instances are all timeless. They are sure to dog you throughout your life. But how many times have you tried to stop it?

This whole film lays bare some of the questions asked in the previous Para. The film takes us through a tumult of emotions that are unforgiving and self centered. It happens on a stage where the rehearsal for the director’s new play named A Dream Play has just ended. Anna who plays the main protagonist has lost her bracelet. But this more of an excuse that she creates to have a conversation with the director. The dialogue begins slowly with just questions about how she should portray character but then it shifts into talks of her hatred towards her mother.

But it is not just a conversation between the two of them that makes the crux of the story. The director while talking to Anna begins to drift into a memory of her mother who was an old lover and the star of his show. The conversation between the two old lovers is of a past that is too painful that is pierces his ideals and sacrifices he had to make as a person so as to give to this medium. It is more like an ode to what Bergman has lost as a person to the world of cinema laying bear all his life and capturing his soul and leaving it on like an exhibit. We are certainly left in a trance with the gravity of conversation hitting the ears of the young Anna who suddenly seems to surface in the director’s dream. But it is here were things begin to saturate he awakens to find revelations of Anna that have had an indelible effect on her very existence. Suddenly there are shades of her mother that begin to play out on stage and feelings of lust get uncovered.

We are not really aware of what is it that made them come up to this stage in their lives. But they begin to role play the future passing years like it really happened between them. The sorry state of the future almost beckons them to leave the times to come. It is in the darkness of this conversation a confession of sort is revealed and also left for our judgment. The writing in this film really exemplifies the baring of the soul that Bergman excels in.