Dir.
Gustaf Molander (Screenplay by Bergman & Molander), 1948, Sweden, 98 mins, subtitles
Cast:
Birger Malmsten, Eva Stiberg, Eva Dahlbeck, Ake Claesson
Ingmar Bergman's career spanned five decades and while some may know that he was a theatrical and eventually television director, he was also the author of over 60 screenplays, some of which were taken, as Eva is, from a self-penned story. The seventh in his oeuvre as a writer, Eva is quite forthright for 1948, even with Scandinavian morals. An energetic, expressive young boy finds his life too tough to manage, so he runs away with a young blind girl. Having been shown how to drive the local locomotive, the boy and the girl jump onto the resting engine and start it up as a means of entertainment and escape - only to come to tragic circumstances. This is shown as a flashback when the young boy, now a talented musician, returns to the scene of this horrific event. Using flashback as an effective illustrative tool for emotion and understanding, Bergman takes us back again to the young man's wooing of his girlfriend as well as the moments before and after he makes love for the first time. Along with the death of his girlfriend's elderly parent and the bald fact that her mother will die soon afterwards from longing, Eva is extremely potent stuff. Nothing is shied away from - early death, expected death, sexual longing, confusion, terrible accidents and, ultimately, war - in what is a screenplay packed with more beautifully paced and accessible strong emotion than most films made today. Giving the script its full force is director Gustaf Molander, the man who introduced the world to Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo . For those who love the moving image, there are few scenes more lyrical than here in Eva when the young boy chases a trio of large draft horses up a forested hill. There are no explosions, no violence or drama, only the fluid movements of the muscular animals fleeing the boy's path. The power of Eva and how it evokes natural beauty and the natural problems of life is primarily down to Bergman's deft, streamlined script giving the director enough content to make a dazzling and searingly real drama.
Karen Krizanovich
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