To Joy (1950) - film review

Stig Eriksson is a violist in a Swedish orchestra company.  During a rehearsal, he is informed that his wife Marta has just died in a domestic accident.  Grief-stricken, Stig looks back on his life over the past ten years, recalling his first meeting with Marta, their marriage and the painful separation that ensued...

After the unremittingly grim tone of Bergman’s preceding films, To Joy marks a distinct change in the director’s outlook on life and his art.  There is darkness and a sadness to this film which is distinctly Bergmanesque, but there’s also a sense of exhilaration and gratitude for life, which is barely glimpsed in Bergman’s earlier work.  With its meticulous and poignant examination of a marriage in crisis, it presages his later films, notably A Lesson in Love (1954) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973).

Whilst To Joy is an engaging and moving work that effortlessly combines melodrama, realism and poetry, it is by no means without its flaws.  Bergman himself admitted the film was "hopelessly uneven", and it does come dangerously close to the kind of sentimentality that he abhorred.  However, the film’s biggest defect is a sequence in which one character (the conductor Sönderby) takes over the narrative in the middle of flashback sequence which presents the memories of another character (Stig Eriksson).  It is the kind of slip you’d hardly expect a great director like Bergman to make, and it is only because the film is so strong in other areas (the cinematography, the acting performances, and a remarkable soundtrack that uses music and background sound brilliantly) that he gets away with it.

Like many of Bergman’s films, To Joy has a significant autobiographical component.  When Bergman was writing the script (during a happy stay in the south of France), he was considering a reconciliation with his second wife Ellen (which, in the event, never happened).  Also, at the time, the director was very preoccupied with failure – the mediocrity of Stig Eriksson (who has the ambition to be a great concert soloist, but not the talent)  representing Bergman’s anxieties over his own skill as a filmmaker.  In some ways, To Joy is one of Bergman’s most personal and revealing films.

The part of the Sönderby was played by Victor Sjöström, a great pioneer of Swedish cinema, who would later star in Bergman’s masterpiece Wild Strawberries (1957).

© James Travers 2007

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