Gigi

IN Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film “Smiles of a Summer Night,” a romantic crisis is sparked by a trip to the theater and, in particular, a moment of eye contact that takes place there. Fredrik Egerman, a middle-aged lawyer, and his much younger wife, Anne, are attending a performance of a sophisticated comedy about French aristocrats starring the well-known actress Desirée Armfeldt. Early in the play, as Desirée delivers a witty, somewhat risqué speech about relations between men and women, she looks up at Fredrik, who was her lover some years before. The glance that passes between them is noticed by Anne, who intuits something not only about her husband’s past but also, more disturbingly if less concretely, about the present state of his desire.
It goes without saying that Bergman captures this transaction between the stage and the space beyond it through techniques of cinema. The camera shifts position, tracking both vectors of the gaze in a smooth and familiar sequence of shot and countershot that allows viewers to be in two places at once and also excludes them entirely. We can see what passes between Desirée and Fredrik — and also witness Anne’s witnessing of Desirée’s look — precisely because we’re not present.
But at the theater — say, at a Broadway performance of “A Little Night Music,” Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s reconfiguration, at once free and faithful, of Bergman’s film — we are. Gazes like the one that passes between Fredrik and Desirée, played in the current revival by Alexander Hanson and Catherine-Zeta Jones, are part of the currency of live theater. It is one of the persistent and pleasant illusions of playgoing that the actors catch our eye and that something meaningful and surprising happens when they do. The countervailing illusion of the movies is that we are not only unseen but unsuspected, peeping into the intimate space of the screen like spies or voyeurs.
This is one of the elementary but nonetheless consequential differences between experiencing the two art forms that was brought home to me recently when I watched “Smiles of a Summer Night” the day after seeing a Saturday evening performance of “A Little Night Music” at the Walter Kerr Theater. The genetic links between the two pieces are very close, to the extent that quite a bit of dialogue heard (or, for the non-Swedish speaker, read) in Bergman’s movie resurfaces in the show.
The story, allowing for a few adjustments of detail, is the same. Sometime early in the 20th century a more or less socially representative collection of Swedes — the bourgeois Egermans; Fredrik’s seminarian son; an army officer who is also a count; his wife, Desirée; and a few servants — gather in the country to conclude the sexual shenanigans they began in town. Though “A Little Night Music” is a musical comedy and “Smiles of a Summer Night,” according to its opening titles, is a romantic comedy, that latter term has more to do with structure than mood. Tears are shed, feelings are hurt, and what makes it all comic is that in the end a sense of proper order, manifested in a series of harmonious heterosexual pairings, is achieved.
The kind of kinship that exists between the film and the show is far from rare. Especially in the early sound era, plays were fodder for cinematic adaptation, and more recently the reverse has been increasingly true. “A Little Night Music” might be seen as a harbinger of the Hollywood-pedigreed productions that clutter Broadway, including tourist-bait spectacles like “The Lion King” and “Shrek the Musical” and also cheekier play-movie scramblings like the current “Brief Encounter” and “Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.” And then there are the round-trip travelers that make the circuit from screen to stage and back again in altered, musical form, like “Hairspray” and “The Producers.” And then, of course, there is “Nine,” the new film based on a Broadway musical (first performed in 1982 and revived 21 years later) that was inspired by a 1963 film, Fellini’s “8 ½” (a movie, like Bergman’s, that notably incorporates elements of stagecraft).
There is no comparing the different incarnations, really, except that such comparison seems irresistible. Some critics in various disciplines may strive to uphold distinctions between the various arts — the movies now playing that were made out of novels are not the same as those novels — but audience members will insist on expressing a preference. And so there will be complaints that Peter Jackson’s version of “The Lovely Bones” is not close enough to Alice Sebold’s novel or that John Hillcoat’s adaptation of “The Road” is too close to Cormac McCarthy’s book. In the case of “Up in the Air,” which takes major liberties with its source, the Walter Kirn novel, or of “No Country for Old Men,” which hews closely to its McCarthy novel, those complaints are more likely to be expressed as praise.
Movies made from books are often assumed to be more accessible but lesser copies of originals, a prejudice that doesn’t always carry over into movies taken from plays, or plays taken from movies. There, trickier questions of authenticity and immediacy assert themselves. It’s not a matter of choosing who is the better artist between, say, Bergman and Sondheim, but rather of discovering what is attractive, and maybe also what is confusing, about the different arts they practice.
Watching Bergman’s film in the wake of my encounter with “A Little Night Music,” I was struck by what John Simon, in an essay accompanying the Criterion Collection DVD of “Smiles,” calls the film’s “theatrical” qualities, the way characters express themselves through dialogue and gesture. But what Bergman does with their eyes also foretells the methods of his later, psychologically probing films and also allows darker, deeper tones of anxiety and ambiguity to seep into the comedy. He uses glances, met and turned away from, somewhat in the way he might, in a theatrical production, use gestures. But they are not gestures; they are inadvertent revelations, mysteries, clues.
And they take place in a sealed realm. Film and theater above all include different kinds of spaces — psychological, social and physical. You watch Bergman, whether at home or in a revival house, in a state of solitude, but you go see “A Little Night Music” in a crowd and partake of its rituals. Many of these strike me, after 10 years of moviegoing with little time for theater, as bizarre, from the apparently obligatory ovations — is there nothing New York audiences won’t stand for? — to the practice of applauding after every number.
These customs may not seem intrinsic to the art, but they are nonetheless (as much as the premonitory warnings, inevitably ignored, to turn off cellphones) part of the context in which the art is now experienced. And so the evening became an encounter with celebrity — Ms. Zeta-Jones and also Angela Lansbury, playing Desirée’s cynical mother — and the applause was an act of communal congratulation for having done so.
In the process Mr. Sondheim was well enough served but, as my colleague Ben Brantley pointed out in his review, Bergman was also coarsened. My own sense is that too many layers of prestige and nostalgia have been laid on to the story, like coats of bright paint. Bergman’s film, though set a half-century before it was made, nonetheless has a present-tense feeling to it, partly because Bergman’s sexual candor remains, at least to Americans, bracing and perhaps a little unsettling. “Smiles of a Summer Night” was his international breakthrough, winning him a prize at Cannes and a worldwide following after an early career of frustration and failure. It was also a touchstone for Americans discovering the worldly pleasures of foreign film.
“A Little Night Music,” when it was first performed on Broadway in 1973, partook of those pleasures and extended them into a new domain. Mr. Sondheim’s worldliness, his skepticism of romantic ideals he nonetheless refuses to abandon entirely, is not exactly congruent with Bergman’s fatalism. But they play off each other nicely, and the show uses period elements as both a distancing mechanism — how odd those people were, with their servants and their linen suits — and a sly way of connecting the past to the present, in how recognizable they are with their neuroses and indecision.
But the past evoked in the revived “Night Music” is less vivid and less specific. It is an era when a story like this, whether glimpsed at the movies or onstage, might have seemed invigorating and revelatory rather than a cultural duty. Which is not to deny its entertainment value, only to note that any other value it might have had is hard to locate.
Something similar, though far less entertaining, happens in the movie “Nine,” which contains a new song about the glories of Italian movies. And just as the big stars in “A Little Night Music” are both a draw and a bit of a distraction, so too does the superabundance of movie celebrities in the “Nine” film prove too much in every way. You don’t see that movie to see Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren and the rest act, much less sing. (If you are wise, you don’t see it at all.) You go for a spectacle of famous people pretending to agonize over, or maybe lampooning, what it means to be famous. Or what it might have meant in some parallel universe version of Italy around 45 years ago.
“8 ½,” as it happens, is a definitive exploration of just that subject, as well as a wild ride into the psychological landscape of an artist. It is one of the coolest Italian movies ever, no doubt, but it is only incidentally, and a bit self-mockingly (if also effortlessly), about how cool Italian movies are. I can’t say if that came through any better onstage, since I haven’t seen the theatrical “Nine.” But it is possible to imagine the same songs and situations being enacted with a vigor and conviction missing from the film version, which makes you want to look away.
Da The New York Times, 27 dicembre 2009