The Cinematheque

“A romantic film of great poignancy and strength and an example of masterful cinema honed down to deceptively simple near-perfection.”

Robert Hawkins, Variety

Bergman’s first film in English divided critics and remains underappreciated. Bibi Andersson plays a Swedish housewife who jeopardizes her nominally happy marriage to a provincial surgeon (Max von Sydow) by embarking on an affair with a volatile Jewish-American archaeologist (New Hollywood icon Elliott Gould). The film is regarded as one of Bergman’s most straightforward and accessible; the director himself described it as, simply, ​“a love story”—although Christian symbolism and the Holocaust figure into the drama.

“A revelation … It was quickly overshadowed by Bergman’s subsequent works [including Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage]—but it’s time to recognize it as a major entry in the director’s canon.”

Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound