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Sunday, June 11, 2017

Walpurgis Night (Valborgsmässoafton) (1935) [NR] ***/****


On April 30th, Walpurgis Night, Swedes gather in restaurants and around bonfires to celebrate the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Johan Borg (Lars Hanson), who yearns to have children, has planned a restaurant dinner with his wife Clary (Karin Kavli), hoping to awaken her maternal instincts. But Clary, who is secretly pregnant, has no interest in giving up her life of fun and freedom, and has already arranged for an illegal abortion because her gynecologist has refused to perform the operation.

Meanwhile, Lena Bergström, (Ingrid Bergman) who is Borg’s secretary and is secretly in love with him, is quitting her job out of romantic frustration. Since Clary refuses to meet Borg for dinner, he invites Lena, and the two are photographed together in the restaurant. And when a news photographer shows the picture to Frederik Bergström (Victor Sjöström), newspaper editor and Lena’s over-protective father, he assumes the two are having an affair. Later, when the elder Bergström hears that the police have raided an abortionist’s office and an unknown woman had had an abortion that very day, he assumes it must be his daughter Lena.

While Clary is not caught in the police raid, evidence incriminating her is left in the abortionist’s office. What follows is an attempt to blackmail Clary and Johan over the evidence. In the confrontation, the blackmailer threatens Johan with a pistol, there is a fight, and Clary shoots and kills the man. Johan and Clary escape undetected, but their marriage is clearly over. Clary leaves Sweden for the European continent and Johan joins the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Later he regrets his decision, escapes from the Legion and returns to Sweden. He goes to the police to confess to the murder and discovers that Clary had recently committed suicide, leaving a letter confessing to the murder, thus exonerating Johan who is now free to renew his relationship with Lena. As the film ends, Johan and Lena are happily married and have a baby.

At the time this film was made, the birth rate in Sweden was falling, so the issue of abortion, whether legal or illegal was a controversial one. One of the solutions presented in the film was that loving, harmonious marriage produces happy, healthy offspring. The film’s ending, featuring a smiling Lena holding her baby and greeting Johan as he arrives home from work, is certainly consistent with that view.

In Walpurgis Night, Ingrid Bergman plays a young woman who falls in love with a married man. A year later, in Intermezzo (1936), she plays Anita Hoffman, a young pianist, who falls in love with a married, world-renown violinist.  And six years later, in Casablanca (1942) she plays Ilsa Lund, a married woman who falls in love with Humphrey Bogart’s character in pre-WW II Paris. In these, and other films, Bergman plays women of morally questionable character, however her natural beauty and innocence lifts up the tone of the films and makes us believe in her characters.

Labels: drama, Ingrid Bergman, romance



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