Den goda viljan

The Good Intentions is a fascinating book for several reasons.

- As a follow-up to The Magic Lantern and Images, tackling not Bergman's own life or work but rather forcing him to humanize someone other than him: the father he spent so much of his life in conflict with. To give Erik Bergman (or Henrik as he has to name him here to preserve some buffer of fiction) his due, not as a son but as a biographer. To expand the story beyond the comfortable. To try to do what his father the priest was supposed to be able to do: Forgive, perhaps not for his father's sake but for his own. (That said, in After the Rehearsal, Bergman has his alter ego, played by Erland Josephson, loudly declare that it's wrong to hate your dead parents - just because they're dead doesn't mean it doesn't hurt them. Not because of any particular belief in an afterlife.)

- As a very unsentimental portrayal of a time that Bergman himself only knew from his elders, and that nobody alive today remembers. Bergman was rarely interested in social issues, so it makes sense that his version of his father is largely clueless too. His attempts to capture anything about pre-democracy Sweden and the early conflicts of the labour movement in a small forest town feel... off. His portrayal of early 20th century bourgouisie much less so. But it's Henrik and Anna (Erik and Karin) and their stormy courtship and marriage that really sells this - a romance that never feels in the least bit sepia-toned. Things were changing rapidly, and the generational divides he paints here feel eerily alive.

- As source material for so many of his films - or perhaps, as a rewrite of them. He openly admits that a lot here is fictionalized, for obvious reasons - he never asked his parents all the questions he should have, and now he's an old man and nobody is alive to ask. So do Winter Light, Fanny and Alexander, Torment, Hour of the Wolf etc etc spring wholesale from family stories, or is it the other way around, or is fact and fiction a feedback loop that reenforces itself?

- As a novel, of course, it's a mess, so much so that I consider dropping it after 100 pages. Not bad, just messy. There's no doubt that Bergman was a great writer - there are 50+ films, very few of which are outright bad, to attest to that. The Good Intentions, however, reads like a first draft that can be turned into either a novel or a screenplay (it would, of course, be used for both). Bergman is very much an active narrator in this, which I suspect he's not in the film (seen it once, almost 30 years ago, remember next to nothing); if you've heard him speak, you recognize his voice immediately. But both the form, breaking into script form whenever he hits dialogue, and the conversational, repetitive tone of it reads like something that's supposed to be handed over to a director and his actors to work out. (He's nothing if not professional: The book is the basis for a 4x90min miniseries, and each chapter is almost exactly 96 pages.)

It's a fascinating but frustrating book. But I suppose he meant well.