Bergman, Ullman and a peculiar family love triangle
Fiction: Unquiet
Linn Ullman
(Hamish Hamilton, €12)
September 27 2020 02:30 AM
Linn Ullmann is the daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullman and the late Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. She is a successful author in her own right, and in Unquiet, her seventh novel, she writes about the peculiar love triangle between a daughter, and her famous parents.
Bergman's films still have an iconic presence in European cinema. I had the gloomy pleasure of taking a class as an undergraduate called The Nordic Legacy where every Wednesday afternoon as the light faded, we filed in to watch one Bergman masterpiece after another. Bergman's films left an indelible impression on my imagination. There's almost no way of unseeing Ekerot as Death in The Seventh Seal for example, and Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny Alexander still have an influential hold on the work of contemporary filmmakers.
But Ullman's Unquiet is not a book which lays out the facts of her parents' careers. It's a much more personal record than that - a biographical mosaic which blends fiction and memoir, flitting from first to third person and flowing from past to present and back again capturing the dream her father often described life to be. In that sense, the title Unquiet is apt.
For much of the novel, the narrator is uneasy. She has recorded her father as an old man in the hope that they will write a book together. Sadly, at times, it looks like a form of dementia has set in. "He said he was ready to resume his duties as a royal coachman."
Then, Ullman misplaces the tapes, only years later to find them. She listens to them reluctantly, and transcribes them. It is these recordings which act as a trigger to the reflections on Ullman's relationship with her mother and father.
Ullman's parents were together for five years, made 11 films over the course of their lives, but never married. Bergman had nine children with six different women. He was a patriarch in many ways.
Still, there's a special bond between Ingmar and Linn, as presented in the book. As a 74-year-old man, she keeps him company after his last wife Ingrid has died. "Only now does God decide to kick me out of the nursery," he says to her in his own inimitable way.
Linn, or the narrator, experiences her own hardships, a failed marriage which we do not hear much about, and in one heartbreaking episode, she describes with dispassion how an older photographer wants to take her at the age of 15 from New York where she is living with her mother to Paris, in order to photograph her. Her mother has reservations, but allows the trip nonetheless, even shopping for clothes with her daughter for the stay. What happens next made me have to put the book down.
Liv Ullmann was one of the most magnetic and expressive actors in world cinema. Bergman directed her with guile in Persona, and Shame, but she was not always a good mother.
"I hate America. I hate my mother." That may sound strong, but the writer does not apportion blame, nor does she dwell on how she was left without a guiding parental presence for much of her tender growing years. In that way, it's fascinating to read Unquiet alongside her mother's memoir Changing and her father's memoir Magic Lantern where Bergman talks about film as dream, and the fact that we are all emotional illiterates.
Paul Perry's novel 'The Garden' is forthcoming from New Island Books, 2021
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