208 - Port of Call, 1948, Sweden. Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

Thursday, July 27. 2017

208 - Port of Call, 1948, Sweden.  Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

How old does one need to be to be free to live as an adult?

The actress Nine-Christine Jonsson was around 22 when she starred in Port of Call, but the age of her character Berit is not clear.

She is out of school.  She is old enough to have a full-time job at a factory.  And she has had several lovers.  However, she lives with her mother, who dominates her, and she is still supervised by a social worker who threatens to send her back to Reformatory for the slightest behavioral infraction.

And she seems to have no way of freeing herself of this situation.

Berit walks to the warf.  She approaches the edge.  She jumps in.

Gosta jumps in after her.  He swims her out.  He saves her life.

Gosta is a sailor who has just recently docked at that very wharf.

The medics take her and he returns to his work.

Later at a dance he dances with her and takes her home, apparently unaware that it is the same girl whose life he saved.

And this begins a relationship that we will explore through the movie.

Gosta and Berit come together in the messy and uncertain kind of way that people do in real life. And this makes the story more compelling.  In the early stages, they are not even sure if they will see one another again after each encounter.

And when she begins to tell him about her past life, he has to make adjustments to process and accept the new information.

She has a friend from Reformatory, Gertrud, who is struggling more than she is, and her story comes into play.

Their respective workmates also affect their relationship, both at work and in the evenings.

Berit tells Gosta her story in flashbacks.  And in one we see the girls at Reformatory sitting around miserably at Christmastime.

The Swedish version of "O Holy Night" is playing:

When holy Jesus to mankind was born
There to redeem / The sins of the world
For our sake did he die on the cross.

But the girls are unhappy.

Gertrud is the one who sneaked out and slept with the gardener in exchange for cigarettes, perfume, lipstick, and decent underwear.

One gets the sense that reputation matters in this world, and that Berit has been branded as not having a good one.  But since we see the world through her eyes, we sympathize with her and see her as someone with good and decent desires.  She wants to be loved.

And Gosta is there to love her.

He acknowledges that life is full of "all kinds of bother and trouble."  She says, "It all gets to be too much."  He replies, "But we have each other.  We didn't have that before."  She demurs, "I'm not much to have."

And he answers her.  "To me you are."

To me you are.

Things must be all right then.

We won't give up.

No.  They will not give up.