The Touch and The Serpent’s Egg: Foreign Tongues

The Touch centers on a volatile affair in an unnamed Swedish hamlet. David (Elliott Gould), a troubled American Jewish archaeologist, has come to Sweden to work on a dig at an ancient church; a kindly doctor named Andreas (Max von Sydow) invites him to his house for supper. David immediately sets about seducing Andreas’s enchanting wife, Karin (Bibi Andersson)—and succeeds in initiating an affair that will last two years and buckle the doctor’s marriage and the sanity of both of the affair’s participants.

Common enough in Bergman’s universe, but Bergman does not tell the story straight: the underlying facts, such as the revelation that Andreas met David when he treated him after a suicide attempt, come to us late, so that we always feel we are swimming in a murk of indecipherable expressions and behaviors. All we know at the outset, for example, is that David is troubled and explosive; his confession of love to Karin, while Andreas is in the next room, is so bold as to seem nearly insane. Later, after the stormy affair has leveled off somewhat, we learn that David lost his extended family in the Holocaust, though he, his mother, and his sister escaped Germany for the U.S. when he was four. But Bergman, the Mozart of ambiguity, never draws a straight line between David’s sexually violent side and the historical atrocity; it is up to us to infer. Rather, we receive David as a new lover would, as a force of nature—a dark-haired, lumbering, hirsute, and even demonic American who has barged into a serene blond universe.

And what a universe it is! Bergman codes the interior of Karin’s home in burnt oranges and tans and furnishes it in the mid-century-modern style that hipsters today worship. When Karin vacuums and stows away laundry in her bright house, the filmmaker throws in a hilarious ad jingle to italicize the moment—a wink, perhaps, to the fact that he first met Andersson while filming a soap commercial.

Andersson is magnificent as the reactive but passionate Karin—a woman who, we feel, gets drawn into the affair because, after fifteen years of marriage and two kids, she is charmed by being seen in a new way. “I’m not a very experienced mistress,” she tells David the first time she pays a visit to his Dostoyevskian bachelor pad in town. Like her behavior, her accented English is tentative—you feel that Karin is making a new self for herself in this new language. Minutes before, when they sit side by side on a hideous green rexine sofa, she watches David’s hands shake as he pours sherry. “You nervous, David?” she asks. “Yes, I’m nervous; my pulse must be 690. Aren’t you nervous?” he responds. “Well, I’m almost fainting,” she says with a high, delicate laugh. The acting is so brittle and intimate that you almost wish, as the viewer, to embrace and comfort them. For me, this is the most affecting scene in all of Bergman.

The Touch is a woefully underrated film. Had it not been my first Bergman film, caught on a whim at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I might never have watched it at all—the reviews are so tepid, and Bergman himself called it his very “bottom.” But it stayed with me for years—particularly David’s bipolar rages—and pitched me into the Bergman universe. Bergman was not, as I had heard, a dour filmmaker; rather, his work was attuned to the comic overturnings and ironies of passion. Save for the abrupt ending, I consider The Touch a near masterpiece. 

The strength of the movie, as with so much Bergman, is that the background is placid—all the drama is concentrated in the faces and personalities; the wounds are self-inflicted. We feel the full force of James Baldwin’s observation, in a 1960 Esquire profile of the director, that “the landscape of Bergman’s mind was simply the landscape in which he had grown up”—his total identification with his Swedish backdrop renders it eternal. Though mainly in English, The Touch’s dialogue loses none of its power in this translation—in fact, the language barrier forces the lovers to express themselves in essentials. We can even excuse Gould’s occasional overenunciation of his lines as a tic—a way of being intelligible to his foreign mistress.