Three women are confined to a hospital room together, each one dealing with pregnancy, in Ingmar Bergman's 1958 film Brink of Life (Nära livet). Performances are centre stage in this movie which takes place entirely inside a few bland hospital rooms. Eva Dahlbeck, in particular, brings something absolutely devastating to the screen. The whole film is unrelentingly fascinating, though.
The film begins with Cecilia (Ingrid Thulin) who's been brought to the hospital because she's been bleeding. Of the three women, she comes off as the wisest, possibly because of a delirious monologue she has on being brought to the room. She strings together pieces of dialogue from the two or three previous scenes and weaves a perfectly sensible, entirely disoriented, impression of how things stand. The tiniest suggestions of indecision and insecurity have now become the certain omens that predicted her miscarriage, the hints of incompatibility in her marriage now become the undeniable sin for which she must surely now be punished.
There's something religious about it, like a Puritan's or Calvinist's compulsive thoughts on predestination.
Meanwhile, the youngest of the three women, Hjordis (Bibi Andersson), was unhappy with her pregnancy. She's not married to her boyfriend and sees her new child only as a sign of trouble. Her story feels oddly conventional compared to the other two women and she works best just as someone for them to react to.
Stina (Dahlbeck) meanwhile exhibits and extreme, very charming eagerness to have her child. Dahlbeck giggles and speaks rapidly, doing things that might have seemed more at home in a lighthearted comedy. But her performance does a horrific 180 degree turn that is all the more effective for these earlier scenes. I wasn't surprised to find out one of her scenes was censored in Italy.
Brink of Life is available on The Criterion Channel.
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