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"There's not much to say about A Lesson in Love. You can appreciate that the film is a turmoil, but a well-organized turmoil"
(Ingmar Bergman, from the diary-book Images)
The film is the story of Albert Johansson, director of a clumsy circus in deep crisis with audiences and takings. Albert has a relationship with a young and beautiful woman, Anna, emphatically called the Spanish horsewoman. For her, he abandoned his wife, home, and three children a few years earlier. During a visit to the theater, where Albert goes to borrow stage costumes from director Sjuberg, Anna, who accompanies him, encounters the actor Frans, a charming and enterprising womanizer. She gets ensnared and seduced by him. When Albert decides to visit his wife, Anna, taking advantage of his absence and irritated by his decision, returns to the theater where she cheats on him with the actor, attracted by the sparkle of a jewel that Frans dangles in front of her, which turns out to be fake and worthless. Albert is also seduced, not by his wife, but by her quiet life as a wealthy merchant. He even asks her if he can come back to her, tired and disappointed by the roaming life of a circus performer. In return, he offers his help as a clerk in her stores. But the wife refuses, having identified the ex-husband as the source of all her previous troubles and concerns. During the first evening show, Anna is insulted by Frans, who reveals their relationship to everyone. Then Frans, increasingly vulgar, insults, humiliates, and beats Albert, who, wanting to avenge his partner's fling, challenges him to fight in the middle of the audience. Albert, morally and physically destroyed, and with no prospects, first announces suicide, then threatens a massacre, but finally changes his mind and only kills Alma's bear. In the end, everything returns to its place. The circus resumes its tour. Albert and Anna get back together. They give each other another chance.
The film is essentially based on an autobiographical episode. Bergman, who forces his lover to tell him about her past erotic experiences. From here stems the exhausting experience of jealousy that he recalls, condensing it into the dramatic prologue, which he has told by Albert and the spectator by the coachman. Alma, the bear tamer, bathes naked in front of the amused and excited gazes of a regiment of soldiers practicing at a shooting range. Her husband Frost, warned by an attendant of what is happening behind his back, blinded by jealousy, goes to retrieve her amid the troop's jeers, and lifting her, tries to bring her back to the circus tent. He has a physical illness due to the immense effort and is helped by his circus colleagues, who rally around him. A sad, harsh, violent film. French critics of the time called it the blackest of Bergman's films. It condenses some themes dear to Bergman, taken from previous films and which will be revisited in later films. The relationship between different forms of art: the theater as a noble art, opposed spectrally to the circus, seen as a similar but lower-ranked art. The seesaw between reality and fantasy; reality and fiction; reality and performance, often confused and intertwined in everyday life. The unreliability of art, which finds its icon in the vicious, false, and adulterous actor, Frans. And in the offensive words that director Sjuberg (an autobiography?) directs at Albert, confessing in the end that he considers himself the same as him. The problematic communication issues between people. The difficult-to-manage interpersonal relationships of marriage, love, sex, and jealousy (also autobiographical). The problem of unhappiness and dissatisfaction as an irreversible human condition. Love between people and family as the only solution to the problem of happiness, loneliness, and indigence. Harriet Andersson, the absolute protagonist in the role of Anna, holds the center of the scene with her overwhelming beauty and spontaneity, confirming her greatness after Sommaren med Monika and before Through a Glass Darkly, she plays (re)playing Monika, as in the previous film. The similarities between the two characters are striking. Sensuality, carnality, immaturity, seductive ability, vulnerability, ambition, volatility, duplicity, amorality, the desire for determination to change one's social and economic conditions by any means and at any cost, are the same as the other character. Accompanied here by an equally high tendency to delinquency and betrayal, always directed towards seeking a better life. Even in this film, the almost criminal design of a better life brings Anna (like Monika in the previous one) to the extreme consequences: when practically without moral scruples, she offers a sexual performance to actor Frans, in exchange for a promise of absolute discretion and the offer of a jewel that promises her a year of survival and freedom from circus hunger and deprivation. A genuine act of prostitution. Bergman recalls, as in Monika and Desire, how there are essentially two ways in which in 1950s Sweden a woman could “liberate” herself from needs and/or emancipate herself: hard work or “the good life”. Remember in the role of theater director Sjuberg, a young Gunnar Bjornstrand, elegant, haughty, and mocking, but overall available and understanding with his poorer circus colleagues.
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