Waiting Women (1952) - film review

Whilst waiting for their husbands to join them at their holiday home, four sisters-in-law swap stories about their lukewarm marriages.  Rakel recalls how her husband threatened to shoot himself when he learnt she had been amusing herself with another man.  Marta remembers the idyllic time she spent in Paris, where she fell in love with an artist, who later left her without realising she was pregnant. Karin recounts the time she spent a night trapped in a lift with her workaholic husband.  Before Annette can tell the story of her failed marriage, the husbands arrive – just as Marta’s younger sister Maj slips away to elope with her boyfriend...

Waiting Women marked a significant turning point in the fortunes of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.  His eleventh film, this was Bergman’s first significant commercial success and was the first in a series of films he made in the early 1950s which would establish him as one of the foremost cineastes of his generation.  Bergman made the film after an 18 month break from directing, which was due mainly to a major strike in the Swedish film industry in 1951.

Structured as a series of self-contained vignettes, Waiting Women takes a tragicomic look at the transience of romantic love, a subject which Bergman would explore with somewhat more seriousness in his next film, Summer with Monika (1953).  The dark mood of that film contrasts with the lighter tone of Waiting Women, which includes some of the funniest escapades of any Bergman film.

The film’s highpoint is the third flashback, in which one of the sisters-in-law recalls how she and her husband came to spend a night in a lift.  More Billy Wilder than Ingmar Bergman, the sequence is an hilarious departure into unbridled farce, with great comedy performances from Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand.  Bergman admitted that one of the happiest experiences of his life was to secretly listen to cinema audiences laughing at his jokes in this film.

Also notable is the middle vignette, set in Paris, with some stunningly beautiful location sequences shot with an evocative mix of French poetic realism and Italian neo-realism.  This segment of the film has an eerie dreamlike character which is accentuated by the sparsity of the dialogue, with some sequences shot as a silent film.   By contrast, the opening vignette (a familiar tale of marital infidelity, based on a play written earlier by Bergman) is pretty mundane.

Whilst the curious mix of styles employed by Bergman is at times jarring, Waiting Women stands as one of the director’s most accessible and enjoyable films.  Both the script and direction suggest greater maturity and confidence than shown by Bergman in his previous offerings.  The characters are drawn with depth and affection, and the reality of their situation invites not just our sympathy, but also leads us to reflect more deeply and make comparisons with our own experiences.

The complexity and unpredictability of human relationships held an endless fascination for Ingmar Bergman and would preoccupy him for the next five decades, the result being an extraordinary collection of films in which Bergman probed the human psyche more thoroughly, more ruthlessly than perhaps any other filmmaker.

© James Travers 2007

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