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The Passion of Anna movie storyline. The interaction between four lost, tortured and/or conflicted souls on a sparsely populated desolate island in the middle of winter is presented. After the dissolution of his marriage, Andreas Winkelman spends his time alone repairing his farm house, without a means of income. While he enjoys the solitude in being contemplative, the solitude is also due to his legal troubles.
He meets Anna Fromm when she asks to use his telephone. She is recuperating from a car accident that killed her husband, also named Andreas, and their son. She outwardly states that she searches for truth in the way she lives, while she is less than truthful herself. Anna eventually begins a relationship and moves in with Andreas.
During her recovery, Anna lived with her friend Eva Vergérus and her husband Elis Vergérus, who Andreas knows casually. Elis is an architect, his current project being a cultural center in Milan, and does photography on the side, his collection of photographs, largely of posed human subjects, which he catalogs by emotion. Elis is quietly judgmental, the cultural center which he states will be a mausoleum of the meaninglessness in which his class strives.
Eva, an insomniac, is a lonely woman who has no sense of herself, and as such ends up unwantingly being swept into the lives of those around her. She and Andreas have a brief affair – not her first, and not her first with an Andreas – in her loneliness. As a backdrop to the four, an unknown person has been torturing and then killing animals on the island, with most suspecting the culprit to be elderly Johan Andersson in what they consider his mental instability. Also as a backdrop to story of the four, the four actors as themselves talk about their interpretation of their own character.
The Passion of Anna (Swedish: En passion – “A passion”) is a 1969 Swedish drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, who was awarded Best Director at the 1970 National Society of Film Critics Awards for the film.
The film has its origins in Bergman’s 1968 film Shame, also starring Ullmann and Von Sydow. After shooting of Shame completed, Fårö’s environmental regulations required the house built for the film be burned, but Bergman had developed an attachment to its appearance and saved it by claiming there were plans to use it in another film. He began writing The Passion of Anna, and with Von Sydow and Ullmann still contracted to work with him, envisioned The Passion of Anna as “virtually a sequel.”
About the Story
The audience is introduced to Andreas Winkelman, a man living alone and emotionally desolate after the recent demise of his marriage. He meets Anna, who is grieving the recent deaths of her husband and son. She uses a cane as a result of the car crash that killed them. While Anna uses Andreas’ phone, he listens to her conversation, after which she departs visibly distraught. Anna has left her handbag behind and Andreas searches it, finding and reading a letter from her husband that will later prove she is deceptive.
The narrative of the film is periodically interrupted by brief footage of the actors discussing their characters.
Andreas is friends with a married couple, Eva and Elis (mutual friends of Anna) who are also in the midst of psychological turmoil. Elis is an amateur photographer who organizes his work based on emotion. Eva feels Elis has grown tired of her and has problems sleeping. One night while Elis is away, Eva visits Andreas, as she is bored and lonely. They listen to music and drink wine, which makes them drowsy, and finally Eva sleeps for several hours. When she wakes up, they have sex. Afterward, she explains that during her only pregnancy years ago, she went to the hospital to treat her insomnia. The medicine they gave her helped her condition but killed the child. She conveys that it allowed her and Elis to share a moment of emotional affinity.
Andreas visits Elis whom he promised could photograph him. Elis leaves the room for a moment and Eva enters. In their conversation, Eva reveals that Anna has moved in with Andreas, and though she is not displeased (as she likes both of them), she warns him to be wary of Anna. Elis enters the room; when Eva asks him why he looks angry, he says he only gets angry at human trifles (alluding to the affair).
Their relationship is not passionate, but Andreas and Anna start off relatively content. Anna appears zealous in her faith and steadfast in her search for truth, but gradually her delusions surface—reinforced by what Andreas read in the letter. For his part, Andreas is unable to overcome his feelings of deep humiliation about himself and remains disconnected, further dooming the relationship with Anna, as he prefers solitude and freedom to companionship.
Throughout the film, an unknown person among the island community commits acts of animal cruelty, hanging a dog and violently killing cattle. A friend of Andreas is wrongly accused of these crimes, leading the community to threaten and beat him, catalyzing his suicide. Within a few days of the friend’s death, Anna and Andreas have a physical fight during which they reveal their strong distaste for each other.
Afterwards, Anna lies in bed while Andreas follows two firetrucks that passed his home. They were headed to a large barn fire. When Andreas arrives, he is told that the unknown man who is the true culprit of the animal cruelty covered a barn full of animals in gasoline and lit it on fire, locking the animals in. It is obvious to the community that Andreas’s friend was unjustly abused and committed suicide because of flimsy human suspicion; therefore, chances for healing are lost.
The Passion of Anna (1969)
Directed by: Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell, Sigge Fürst, Ingmar Bergman, Britta Brunius, Malin Ek, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, Marianne Karlbeck
Screenplay by: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography by: Sven Nykvist
Film Editing by: Siv Lundgren
Costume Design by: Mago
Makeup Department: Cecilia Drott, Börje Lundh
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: United Artists
Release Date: November 10. 1969
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