„You should talk about fairness! Don’t come crying for consideration or sympathy. Take responsibility. Own up to it. For once, make a decision and accept the consequences.”
The 1971 released Swedish-US-American film drama ‘The Touch’ by Ingmar Bergman, is his first bilingual film, that you can tell, because not only does the dialogue seem a bit bumpy at times, even the actors sometimes seem like amateurs, especially Elliott Gould, who only must speak in his native language, yet gives the weakest performance. But more on that later.
Married Karin Vergerus (Bibi Andersson) has just lost her mother when she meets foreign archaeologist David Kovac (Elliott Gould) for the first time. He quickly confesses his love for her, and she ends up in his bed even faster. A family drama unfolds in which Andreas Vergerus (Max von Sydow) can only stand by idly.
There is not much to write about this film, the basic idea and the themes dealt with are as typical Bergman as they can be (grief, suppressed feelings, unhappy marriage, infidelity, attempted suicide, etc). However, the film seems anything but a Bergman film, as the dialogue and the acting seem more like a first work by a French director. As expected, Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow perform strongly and harmoniously, but Bibi Andersson struggles to deliver her English lines as emotionally as usual, which nevertheless seems credible as it is not the character’s native language. In contrast, Elliott Gould only plays in his mother tongue and, in my opinion, not particularly well. Not only does most of the dialogue seem read off, but the whole character is not really told in a comprehensible way, be it the sudden mood swings and the subsequent outbursts of anger or the emotional moments, which simply don’t seem authentic. In a film where the characters are the most important thing, this naturally weighs all the more.
The result is a film that has good camera work, likeable characters, especially because of Max von Sydow, who plays great again, that is interesting enough to watch but falls far short of Bergman’s earlier works.
