Owned version: The Blu-ray released by Criterion as part of the massive Ingmar Bergman's Cinema box set they released this past November.
Acquired: Christmas gift from my mother, though it didn't arrive until late January due to the overwhelming interest in the set.
Seen before?: No.
"Many directors' paths are lined with the corpses of actors. Have you ever tried to count your victims?"
Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehersal does not open with a title card. It instead opens with the above image, a shot that drifts over the length of a dressed stage to find its protagonist, director Henrik Vogler, with his head down on a desk. Is he dozing or just collecting his thoughts? No matter - at any rate, he slows stirs himself into upright, conscious life. Soon Anna, the lead actress in the production of Strindberg's A Dream Play Vogler is currently rehearsing, will arrive on set, claiming to be searching for a lost bracelet. Vogler assumes this to be an excuse, that's she's actually looking to talk to him - and he's proven right in quick order. Their two-handed verbal and emotional sparring, with a midfilm break for another back-and-forth between Vogler and older actress Rakel, comprise the body of After the Rehearsal. Just as Autumn Sonata was built out of the sparring between Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, and as Persona was built from the tension between Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, and as Scenes from a Marriage was crafted from the arguments between Ullmann and Erland Josephson... who plays Vogler in After the Rehearsal.
So this is familiar ground for Bergman - indeed, why should we expect anything less from a late-career work from a master with such an identifiable stamp? The value here is in how Bergman embraces the familiar - indeed, weaves it into the fabric of the work. Anna, played with beautifully by Lena Olin, is the latest muse for Vogler, but her connections run deeper than a simple working relationship - one of Vogler's previous muses, Rakel, was in fact her mother, and the role she plays in A Dream Play was one that her mother had previously played for Vogler. This is, in fact, the fifth time Vogler has directed A Dream Play, and there is much discussion not only of Rakel but of another actress, Maria, who had also performed the role previously. Both these actresses, it's revealed, are deceased. Further, it's not just the material that has been reused - the set dressing is also a hand-me-down, with the centrally-placed couch in particular cited as being a holdover from a production of Hedda Gabler. Ghosts and echoes abound this production, and that's even before a literal ghost drifts in for a chat.
But there's something else, another angle that I think makes the idea of old, repetitive material into something productive. Early on, Vogler chastizes himself in voiceover for "...this parody of conviction that's gone sour and crumbled," speaking to a weariness with something well-trod; when he follows this up with, "Why justify myself to this young person who doesn't care what I say?" there's a sense that he's struggling to find his place in the modern way of things. Making Vogler a theater director invites a temptation to read this as autobiography of sorts for Bergman, a temptation the material certainly encourages when, say, Vogler tells Anna, "I make sure the audience loves you," and the film cuts to an over-shoulder shot from Anna's point of view, placing us in Anna's shoes as The Director Himself talks directly to us. But it's more than that - there's a feeling that this is all foregone, that these arguments are not new, that the carpet on the stage has a path worn into it that is currently being followed because that's the way Vogler (and by extension Bergman) wants it. Olin follows in the path of her mother because Vogler demands it; even when she protests about her ability to tackle this demanding role, he responds with, "You can only be that bad if you're talented." Rakel shows up because Vogler incarnates her as a way to expunge lingering issues regarding her and her daughter, and when he says, "Not a day goes by that I don't think of you," is he working out his guilt for having let the elder woman irreparably down or justifying why he's sucked himself into her daughter's orbit? When Anna throws a wrench into the narrative Vogler has dedicated himself to playing out, he responds by charging ahead anyway and narrates in full a fantastic love affair for the two, directing it down the cruelest possible path that results in maximum misery for both parties no matter how Anna tries to get ahead of or redirect this narrative. There's a telling moment during this long sequence where the two are strolling around the stage as Vogler spins his preferred future - at one point, Bergman lets them walk off frame and then zooms down to the stage floor, highlighting the swatches of gaffer's tape that serve as marks to be hit during the play. That's quite the hand-tip there.
If Vogler is then controlling the narrative, as a director is wont to do, sending it along a certain line that satisfies him, it's instructive that we come back to the first shot. Vogler is at his desk in repose. Maybe he's thinking, maybe he's slipped into a cat nap. The film that follows is inexorably tethered to his perspective - he's the only one who we hear on voiceover, he talks to Rakel even though she's dead (with Anna out of focus in the background), and when the story doesn't go to his liking he starts telling a different one. With all the back-and-forth about sadness and aging and death ("I breathe decay. You think I don't know that?"), combined with the pointedness of making the central production A Dream Play and the openly-fantastic interlude with Rakel, I suspect what we have here is not a case of a director breaking down the psyche of a young actress but a director breaking down the psyche of an old director. This is, on at least one level, a feature-length argument Bergman is having inside his own head, and if the chamber up there leaks out some echoes onto the stage where his characters are standing, so be it. Everything around him has gone silent save for the voices in his head yelling at one another; when Vogler muses right before the blackout, "What worried me most in that moment was that I couldn't hear the church bells," it suggests that even God has gone silent. Bergman might know something of that.
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