All These Women (1964)

Movie Info

So many women, so many problems

Famed cellist Villa Tremolo has made a name for himself.  When uppity music critic Cornelius (Jarl Kulle) comes to his countryside mansion, Cornelius also learns that Villa Tremolo has also made himself a harem.  With women abound, Villa jumps from bed to bed with the women who he lives with while his workers Jillker (Allan Edwall) and Tristan (Georg Funkquist) tend to the property.  Unfortunately for Cornelius, Villa doesn’t seem to have an interest in being a subject of his book…and with a big concert coming, it could be the ultimate performance.

Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman (with writing help by Erland Josephson), All These Women (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor) was also released as Now About These Women.  Following Bergman’s The Silence in 1963, the movie is a comedy and was Bergman’s first color film.  The film was released to negative reviews and is largely considered one of Bergman’s weakest films.  The Criterion Collection released a remastered version of the film as part of the Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema boxset.

They’re so wacky!

Having got the Ingmar Bergman boxset, one of the best aspects of it is that you get to see movies that you probably wouldn’t have immediately sought out.  All These Women isn’t one of Bergman’s great films, but it is interesting to see him transition to color and do comedy which he doesn’t do often.  The ingenuity of All These Women is more of a reason to watch than the film.

The movie starts out with the revelation that Villa Tremolo is dead and sets up the style of the film.  The film is considered a riff on Fellini’s 8½ and takes a very surreal approach to the storytelling.  The movie feels very play-like and the humor comes from word play and sight gags.  Knowing Bergman’s style, it is interesting to see, but it also feels beneath him in many ways.

The film has a lot of Bergman players in the women.  You have Bergman’s go-to actresses in the roles of Villa’s lovers and most of the male actors also were Bergman regulars.  It is in this way that the film works in that it is like a stage troupe and you feel that the actors probably have a good sense of each other and are able to play off of each other with the wordplay.

The big concert has arrived

Since the movie is largely sets and often composed of wide shots, it feels like you miss a lot of Bergman’s visual touches.  With his black-and-white films, you see a sense of amazing clarity and life that many color films even lack, and with this film, you don’t get that same feeling.  Bergman does make good use of his frames and the cinematography (for what it is) is quite good.  The basic gag is that you don’t see Villa, and some of the ways Bergman does that are fun.

All These Women is a Bergman film you can skip if you are a fair-weather fan.  It isn’t very spectacular and unlike a “swinging sixties comedy” which it almost feels like it is trying to be, it doesn’t have the fun and sauciness that it wants to have.  Bergman fanatics will want to see his classic actors and the jump to color but will likely walk away kind of disappointed.  Bergman followed All These Women with Persona in 1966.