After the Rehearsal (1984)
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Lena Olin
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Reviews
The director's mea culpa for choosing his art over his family life.
Although After the Rehearsal is blessed with three superb performances (especially Thulin, as a has-been actress who attacks the director for having abandoned her), it is trapped in its staginess.
What we are left with at the end of After the Rehearsal, however, is the very strong sense of an artist who has sacrificed many lives for the sake of his art, and now wonders if perhaps one of those lives was his own.
Ingmar Bergman's own little Tempest in a teapot... Hardly light material, but it's pretty frisky stuff for Bergman.
Reveals the intricate dynamics of male-female sexual dynamics and leaves us more convinced than ever of the bittersweetness of human love
A stark and haunting conclusion to Bergman's main period that combines an intelligent approach to weighty issues with the director's visual flair.
There is something liberating in the very schematism of the project: he no longer needs to pretend that his mouthpieces are real people.


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