Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 31/1/2019)

Now, Lee has produced another remarkable role for an actress (the debuting Jeon Jong-seo) in Burning, a loose adaptation of Haruki Murakami's short story, `Barn Burning', that also contains echoes of William Faulkner's 1939 vignette of the same name. Co-scripted by regular writing partner, Oh Jung-mi, this slow-tapering mystery for three persons and a Schrödinger cat proves teasingly elusive and intriguingly ambiguous. Marking Lee's first film in eight years, it's already a racing certainty for the end-of-year Top 10 and one can only hope that there won't be such a lengthy interval before Lee's next masterpiece. 

Driver Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) is making a delivery in downtown Seoul when he is recognised by shop promotions girl Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-soo). She remembers him from school in Paju and claims he won't know her because she has had plastic surgery. While chatting, she gives him a raffle ticket and he wins a cheap plastic watch, which he gives to her while they have a cigarette break. He reveals his ambition to become a writer and she persuades him to meet her for a drink after work.

They sip beer in a bar, where Hae-mi asks Jong-su to look after her cat while she is visiting Africa. She peels an imaginary tangerine and tells him about the Kalahari Bushmen using the term `Great Hunger' to describe their eagerness for life experience and Jong-su agrees to cat-sit, even though he has to visit his farmer father, Yong-seok (Choi Seung-ho), who has been charged with assaulting a policeman. Lugging his bags, he drops into Hae-mi's bedsit to meet Boil. But there is no sign of the cat and he jokes that it's a figment of Hae-mi's imagination. She insists that she rescued the creature from the basement and claims that it shies away from strangers. The same can't be said for Hae-mi, however, who seduces Jong-su and he notices a shard of sunlight on the wall of the tiny room when they make love. 

Jong-su takes a bus to the farm and arrives in a downpour. The house is deserted and Jong-su feels sorry for a forlorn cow in the barn. During the course of his brief stay, the phone rings a couple of times, but there is no one at the other end when he picks up. While a news bulletin touches on youth unemployment and the secrets behind Donald Trump's rise to power, Jong-su listens to a loudspeaker broadcasting propaganda from behind the nearby North Korean border. 

He returns to Seoul in his father's van, but there is no sign of Boil when he goes to feed it. The litter tray has been used, however, and Jong-su feels the urge to masturbate, as he looks out of the window at the N Tower. He attends Yong-seok's court hearing and the lawyer (Mun Seong-kun) urges him to talk some sense into his stubborn father so that he can be released from prison. However, Jong-su is more interested in the fact that Hae-mi is due to return from Kenya and he agrees to meet her at the airport. 

He is dismayed to discover that she has travelled with Ben (Steven Yeun), a wealthy Korean she befriended during a delay at Nairobi Airport and they whisk him off to eat tripe stew and listen to Hae-mi's account of her adventures. She gets tearful recalling the slow disappearance of a sunset and Ben claims that he has never cried in his life. When Jong-su asks what he does for a living, he smiles that he plays because there's no longer any difference between work and leisure. He inquires about Jung-so's favourite author and seems unimpressed when he cites William Faulkner. However, he jokes that he might hire Jung-so to write his life story before a factotum shows up with the keys to his Porsche and he drives Hae-mi home, leaving Jong-su to return to the farm and another silent phone call.

He drafts a petition for the court, but the neighbours are reluctant to sign because Yong-seok was grumpy and kept to himself. However, the moment Hae-mi calls, Jong-su jumps on a train to the capital and he is frustrated to find that she is still hanging around with Ben. He invites them to his apartment for pasta and Jong-su notices lots of female accoutrements in the bathroom. While smoking on the balcony, he compares Ben to Jay Gatsby and says there are a lot of idle rich in Korea, while people like him have to scrape to make a living. After supper, they go to a nightclub, where Ben shows off Hae-mi to his friends, only for Jong-su to catch him yawning when she gives a demonstration of a Kalahari `hunger' dance. 

Returning to Paju, Jung-so is cleaning out the calf shed when Hae-mi calls to say she is going to visit with Ben. As she gazes over the fields, she reminds Jung-so of the time he saved her from a well (although he clearly has no recollection of any such incident) and she claims to feel at home when she wanders inside the ramshackle farmhouse. They smoke a joint after supper and Hae-mi peels off her top to dance at dusk, with her hands resembling a bird in flight. However, she passes out and they carry her to the sofa. 

Left alone with Ben, Jong-su confesses to hating his father and the rages that cause him to destroy everything around him. He reveals that he had helped him burn his mother's clothing after she had abandoned him and his sister and this prompts Ben to admit to torching greenhouses as a hobby. Piqued that Ben feels he has a right to destroy other people's property, Jong-su says he shouldn't be able to decide whether a building still has a purpose. But Ben insists he is free to do what he likes and hints that he has his eyes on a structure very close to where they are sitting. 

At that moment, Hae-mi joins them and sleepily stretches as the sun comes up. She announces she wants to go home and Jong-su (who has just told Ben that he loves her) whispers in her ear that only whores bare themselves in front of men. Silently, she climbs into the passenger seat and Ben drives away, while reminding Jong-su to keep an eye out for suitable greenhouses to destroy. Having dozed off, Jong-su dreams of his younger self watching a plastic greenhouse burning fiercely and he smiles at the red-hot flames. On waking, he discovers that Ben has left his lighter behind. 

Anxious at not hearing from Hae-mi, Jong-su goes to her bedsit to find that the code has been changed on her door. He tours some of the market gardens near to the farm and peers into some of the sheeting incubators to see if he can spot her. When he persuades her landlady to open the door, however, he discovers that the room has been tidied and that the cat food has been removed from a cupboard. She suggests that Hae-mi has gone on another trip, but he finds her pink suitcase in the bathroom and suspects that something sinister has happened and that Ben has harmed her in the same way he does a greenhouse that has outlived its usefulness. 

While searching for Hae-mi, Jong-su also keeps an eye on the greenhouses near the farm to check whether Ben has torched one. He uses the lighter to set fire to a loose strip of plastic and is shocked by how quickly it burns before damping it out. On following Ben's car to a restaurant in his trendy neighbourhood, Jong-su is equally dismayed by his dismissive attitude to Hae-mi's disappearance. Ben is reading a copy of Faulkner's Collected Stories and he asks Jong-su if he has made any progress with his novel. A girl joins them and Ben wanders out to his car. He confides that he had felt jealous when Hae-mi had confided that Jong-su was the only person she trusted in the entire world, but he also scoffs at the idea she has gone on a trip because he knows she was broke. As he leaves, Ben also suggests that she was entirely alone and one of the saddest people he knows. 

Wondering whether her mother (Cha Mi-kyung) or sister (Lee Bong-ryeon) might have heard from Hae-mi, Jong-su goes to their noodle shop. Her mother declares that she won't be welcomed home until she pays off her debts. Moreover, she also denies that her daughter ever fell in a well and warns Jong-su about falling for her fantasies and fibs. Nevertheless, Jong-su tours the local farms to ask if any has a well and keeps following Ben wherever he goes, even to mass. At one point, they find themselves alongside each other in a Seoul traffic jam, while Jong-su crouches yards away from Ben after he drives into the country to gaze across a tranquil lake.

Out of the blue, Jong-su receives a call from his mother (San Hye-ra), who spends much of their meeting checking her phone, even though they haven't seen each other for 16 years. She does confirm, however, that there was a dried-up well at Hae-mi's place. Renewing his vigil at Ben's place, Jong-su is dismayed when he knocks on the van window and invites him to join his friends for a pot-luck party. He is surprised to see that Ben has a cat and even more taken aback to find Hae-mi's cheap plastic watch in the bathroom drawer full of knick-knacks. 

One of the guests allows the cat to escape and Jong-su helps search the underground car park. When he finds the cat cowering in the corner, he calls it `Boil' and it trots over to him with a miaow. Bored by the conversation about the way Chinese and Koreans treat money and each other, Ben yawns and smiles at Jong-su across the room. He follows him down to the van and urges him to stop being so serious and start enjoying life, so that he feels the deep bass of existence in his chest. But Jong-su doesn't know whether to trust Ben or not. Is he so shallow or is he so careless that another person's life is as meaningless as a greenhouse.

When his father is sentenced to 18 months, Jong-su sells the calf and moves into Hae-mi's bedsit. He imagines her spooning him on the bed and tries to write. But he can't focus and arranges to meet Ben on an icy morning on a remote road near some greenhouses. He asks about Hae-mi and, when Ben fails to answer, Jong-su stabs him repeatedly and bundles his body into the front seat of the Porsche. Dousing the vehicle with petrol, he strips naked and tosses his bloody clothes inside before sparking the lighter. Shaking and sobbing with conflicted emotions at his crime, he drives away. 

Depending entirely upon the viewer's response to the tensions between Jong-su and Ben, this will either be a simmering insight into class envy in post-millennial society or a fascinatingly flawed exercise in unsustained suspense. The significance of Hae-mi is equally debatable, with some seeing her as little more than a MacGuffin, while others have identified her as a symbol of the status of women in South Korean society. Whatever one reads into the action and the characters, however, there is no denying that this is an accomplished piece of film-making that confirms Lee Chang-dong as one of the great masters of mood and enigmatic meaning. It would not be stretching things too far to call him `the Korean Chabrol'.

This isn't the first time the Faulkner aspect of the story has been filmed, as Tommy Lee Jones headlined Peter Werner's short teleplay, Barn Burning, in 1980. But Lee translates its musings on paternal legacy and its lament for the changing of the landscape and all that represents with an acuity that owes much to Shin Jum-hee's thoughtful production design and Hong Kyung-pyo's jitterishly observant widescreen photography. 

The score by Lee Sung-hyun (aka Mowg) reinforces the sense of unease and uncertainty, as the vulnerable but volatile Yoo Ah-in tries to find the missing (but also elusive) Jeon Jong-seo (who excels on debut as a footloose fantasist whose vanishing is by no means as sinister as Yoo perceives), while channelling his bitter resentment at Steven Yeun's intrusion into his cherished daydream. The decision to cast Yeun (who is known for The Walking Dead) makes him seem insouciantly superior to the relatively unknown Yoo, who shares his father's detachment from the unfathomable world around him. But, even though the ennui he exudes makes him eminently resistible, especially when he seems so indifferent to Jong-seo's fate, Yeun pays a heavy price for enjoying so glibly a lifestyle that Yoo not only resents, but also fails to understand. 

British horror has long had an active DIY sector and Iain Ross-McNamee follows up the micro-budgeted The Singing Bird Will Come (2015) with Crucible of the Vampire, a Gothic shocker rooted in the lore of such venerable operations as Hammer, Amicus and Tygon, which dominated the genre in the 1960s and 70s. Co-scripted by Darren Lake and John Wolskel, this virgin in peril saga may not be particularly original. But Ross-McNamee makes effective use of locations across Shropshire, including a splendid wood-panelled manor house that becomes a key character in its own right.

In a 17th-century prologue designed to recall Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General (1968), Matthew Hopkins's trusted assistant, John Stearne (John Stirling), accuses Ezekiel Fletcher (Brian Croucher) of brewing a potion to revive his dead daughter, Lydia (Lisa Martin), and cleaves the necromancer's cauldron in twain with his sword before hanging him from a tree. Leaping forward several centuries, museum director Professor Edwards (Phil Hemming) sends assistant curator Isabelle (Katie Goldfinch) to Shropshire to assess whether the half-cauldron discovered in the basement of a stately home matches the artefact in their collection. 

Uncertain whether she is adequately qualified for such a mission, Isabelle is greeted with cordial scepticism by Karl Scott-Morton (Larry Rew), who had been expecting a senior official to conduct the investigation. He introduces her to his wife, Evelyn (Babette Barat), who had once designed costumes for the theatre, and their skittishly intense daughter, Scarlet (Florence Cady). Over supper, Isabelle learns that the house had been built by a recusant Catholic family and that the Scott-Mortons hope to sell the cauldron to complete their renovations. Evelyn gives Isabelle a torch to light her way to the bathroom, as there is no electricity on her corridor and she is disturbed by noises in the small hours and the sight of a spectral figure in the shadows. 

The next morning, Isabelle comes across Scarlet dancing and asks if she had been moving around in the night. She denies everything, but rummages through Isabelle's bag while she is working in the cellar and steals a pair of her panties. That night, Evelyn brings Isabelle a tonic to drink and she has a strange dream, in which a Scarlet rides a white horse while a long-haired woman rocks on a garden swing. She is still feeling unsettled when Karl asks her about her love life and quotes a passage from St Augustine's Confessions before recommending she consults the copy in the library. 

Pleased with her progress, Karl encourages Isabelle to visit the local pub, where she meets Robert (Neil Morrissey), the gardener at the hall, who tells her the gruesome story of how his predecessor was found with his throat ripped out by barbed wire. Veronica the barmaid (Angela Carter) confides that the Scott-Mortons keep to themselves and inquires whether she has a boyfriend. Sipping on her vodka tonic, Isabelle explains that she is getting over a break-up caused by her strict Catholic views on premarital sex. On her way home along a woodland path, Isabelle is followed by Tom (Aaron Jeffcoate), who warns her not to linger at the house and is thrashed across the face by Karl for his impertinence and for trespassing on his land. 

Wandering into the library the next morning, Isabelle finds a document written in 1807 by Jeremiah Kane (Charles O'Neill), who had discovered the Stearne cauldron by the banks of the river and had been driven out of the property by the recurring sound of pipe music and the apparition of a staring woman. She keeps the account to herself, however, as she wanders to the village to use the payphone (Scarlet has stolen her mobile) to inform Edwards that Karl refuses to let the cauldron off the premises and insists on the other half being sent by the museum so she can confirm they match. 

Frustrated by what he considers to be money-grabbing tactics, Edwards agrees and Isabelle returns to the hall, where Robert explains that Tom is the son of his predecessor and has it in for himself and Karl. He urges her to take care. But, as she sleeps, Isabelle is woken by Lydia prowling around the room and she seeks sanctuary in Scarlet's bed. She proceeds to tell her a ghost story and seduce her, with Isabelle being seemingly powerless to resist, even as Scarlet nuzzles her neck and bears her fangs. 

Checking for marks on her throat the next morning, Isabelle comes down to breakfast and is being questioned about her dreams by Evelyn and Scarlet when the other half of the cauldron arrives in the post. Karl seems excited, but takes umbrage when Isabelle mentions ghosts and Robert again warns her about offending her host. Undaunted, she gets up in the night and uses an organ in the hall to play the melody that Kane had recorded in his memoir and she seems surprised when the notes summon Lydia, who not only places a clammy hand on the keyboard, but who also confronts Isabelle, as she returns to her room by torchlight. 

Despite only having half an hour before her train the next morning, Isabelle agrees to try a pressée that Karl has concocted and again seems taken aback when she loses consciousness and wakes to find herself lashed to a mattress in a fly-filled attic. He explains that he was never interested in selling his half of the cauldron, as he needs it to revive Lydia so that she can bestow the gift of immortality to her disciples. Isabelle manages to wriggle free, but she is captured by a group of hooded figures that includes Veronica, who proceeds to draw the syringe of her virginal blood that Karl needs for the resurrection ritual.  

However, Isabelle manages to turn the table and turns Karl into a fireball with a thrown candle before she stabs Evelyn and caves in Veronica's head with the cauldron. As she attempts to flee, however, she is pursued by the knife-wielding Scarlet, while Lydia dispatches Robert when he tries to protect Isabelle. After a protracted chase through the upper part of the house, Scarlet plunges over the staircase balustrade, while Lydia perishes in a ball of flame after she follows Isabelle into the daylight. Yet, she still seems to have learnt nothing from her experiences, as Isabelle wanders back indoors, as the image is tinted blood red. 

While the storyline might lurch between contrivances and some of the support playing leaves a lot to be desired, Ross-McNamee manages to generate a palpable sense of unease in this serviceable chiller. Punctuated by some rather pompous chapter headings, the action lacks suspense. But an air of menace pervades proceedings that are made all the more unsettling by the atmospheric use of Acton Reynald Hall, as Richard Carlton's camera prowls around the creaking corridors to the accompaniment of Michelle Bee's ominous score. 

Ross-McNamee's editing isn't always as sharp as it might be, while he ends too many scenes with close-ups of puzzled expressions that recall what Matt LeBlanc called `smell the fart' acting in an episode of Friends. Clearly, Neil Morrissey is the most familiar face on show, but he is very much of secondary significance, as the onus falls on sophomore star Katie Goldfinch to convey the requisite blend of dread and vulnerability required of a horror heroine. Larry Rew is hammily threatening as her host, while the debuting Florence Cady camps it up as best she can in homage to Ingrid Pitt in Roy Ward Baker's The Vampire Lovers (1970). Doubtless she and Goldfinch will go on to better things. But, while he is still very much a neophyte, Ross-McNamee does enough to suggest that he has potential. 

The lesbian theme continues in Polish writer-director Olga Chajdas's debut feature, Nina. Exploring how church and state seek to dictate how women use their bodies, this is a well-meaning melodrama that also touches on the way that class and external cultural influences impinge upon post-Communist society. But, for all her references to Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963), Chajdas over-indulges her penchant for artily significant imagery, while struggling to impose herself upon a story that often defies narrative logic.

Magda (Eliza Rycembel) is a security guard at Warsaw airport who likes to sleep around when stewardess lover Ada (Tána Pauhofová) is out of town. Sometimes cutting it fine before kicking conquests to the kerb, she meets Nina (Julia Kijowska) when the French teacher bumps into her car while parking near the garage owned by her husband, Wojtek (Andrzej Konopka). Initially, Magda is far from impressed by the haughtily bourgeois Nina, who tries to interest her class in the films of Jean-Luc Godard and installations by female Polish artists. 

She is also striving to find a surrogate mother, as she cannot conceive. However, her latest lead insists on retaining contact with the child and she is sufficiently frustrated to go along with Wojtek's suggestion that they invite Magda to dinner and sound her out about carrying their child. They get tipsy and smoke a joint before Magda asks if they want her for a threesome. However, she loses her nerve when Wojtek says she would only be sleeping with him and she composes herself in her car, while Nina browbeats her husband for making such a clumsy advance. 

But something has clearly clicked in Magda and she crashes her car so she has to return to the garage. Nina is also intrigued by the spiky stranger and asks Wojtek to give her two weeks to broach the subject of surrogacy. She calls round to her apartment to check she is okay after being concussed and they flirt while being wary of each other. But Nina feels under pressure from her mother, Ewa (Katarzyna Gniewkowska), to produce grandchildren like her sister, Sylwia (Magdalena Czerwinska), and convinces herself that becoming parents is the only way to save her stale marriage to a man she has known since they were at school, even though they are from very different backgrounds and have little in common beside their romance.

When not clumsily striving to seduce Madga while trying to sell her a new car, Wojtek is also concerned about his hospitalised father (Ryszard Jablonski). So, he gives Nina carte blanche in her dealings with Magda. She takes her to see Natalia Bazowska's womb-like installation, `Birth Place', and they lounge around inside the red-lined, light-pulsating cocoon and discuss the inner strength that women have and how the wives of some Persian warriors had used the act of `anasyrma' to renew their courage after defeat at the hands of the Medes.  

For all their circling of each other, however, neither woman places her cards on the table. Thus, Magda is taken aback when Nina finally asks her to be their surrogate and Nina is equally nonplussed when she follows Magda to the bar where she is due to meet a same-sex blind date. Despite their mutual surprise, Nina follows Magda to a lesbian club and, with loud music throbbing in time to their heartbeats, they watch another couple canoodling in a corridor and mock some soldiers on duty before Nina returns home to inform the slumbering Wojtek that she doesn't love him any more.

When they next meet, Nina surrenders herself to Magda and they sleep together. She also joins her at a club with Lola (Maria Peszek) and the other members of her five-a-side football team. However, Wojtek sees them gyrating together through the window and he gives Nina a fortnight to sort herself out or he will leave her to face telling her family that she is gay. But, just as she is coming to terms with being Magda's lover, Ada surprises them in the bath together and Nina is jolted out of her daydream and flees into the wintry night. She confides in her younger sister, Malwina (Alicja Juszkiewicz), that she is now `Magda-sexual' and doesn't know what to do for the best. 

Magda is also in a spin and goes to a bar to find a random guy to sleep with. However, Wojtek has followed her and takes her back to the room above the garage where he is staying. He demands to know whether they laughed at him while they made love and makes a half-hearted attempt to force himself upon her. But Magda takes control of the situation and gets pregnant. She calls on Nina and places her hand on her belly, only for her to recoil in horror. 

Shortly afterwards, Nina and Wojtek attend Malwina's wedding. During the reception, he whispers something in her ear and she stalks out of the hall and finds herself striding along a snow-covered highway (as she had been in a dream she had confided to Magda). She pauses to look at a deer with its fawn in a field and smiles when the animal turns to meet her gaze. Heading back to the city, she goes to Madga's flat and stands meekly before her in the hope that they can make a go of things. 

Given that few Polish actresses have played lesbians since Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak and Grazyna Szapolowska in Karoly Makk's Another Way (1982), Julia Kijowska and Eliza Rycembel deserve considerable credit for their performances in this bold feature, which Chajdas has co-written with Marta Konarzewska and edited with her partner, Kasia Adamik, who is the director daughter of the award-winning doyenne of Polish cinema, Agnieszka Holland. But, such is Chajdas's determination to turn each frame into a social, sexual and aesthetic statement that her strained saga becomes increasingly self-conscious with each twang of Andrzej Smolik's excruciating experimental score. 

Production designer Anna Anosowicz does a good job of contrasting Nina and Magda's apartments. But Chajdas has cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk shoot so many scenes through windows, doorways and framing metalwork that any sense of the images reflecting Nina's confused and myopic worldview is quickly overtaken by a longing for the dizzyingly restless camera to settle down and observe the action from an unencumbered vantage point. 

The stylistic skittishness does distract from the implausibilities of plot, however, as Nina and Wojtek seem to have been brought together solely for thematic convenience, while Chajdas and Konarzewska similarly struggle to persuade us of the risk-all passion between Nina and Magda. The leads do what they can, but the characterisation is as perfunctory as the chaste eroticism and the emotional superficiality of a meandering romance that misses the opportunity to declare that Polish women no longer need men's permission to lead free and fulfilled lives. 

In 2013, Swedish television journalist Jane Magnusson invited film-makers of the calibre of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Michael Haneke, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Takeshi Kitano, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, Ridley Scott, Wes Anderson and Lars von Trier to Ingmar Bergman's island retreat on Fårö to assess his place in screen history. Now, following Trespassing Bergman, she has returned to the Swedish titan for Bergman: A Year in a Life, in which she takes 1957 as a starting point for a reassessment of his artistic status given his egregious flaws as a human being. 

While he may have produced such landmark pictures as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, as well as four lauded stage productions and other works for radio and television, the 39 year-old Bergman was struggling with both his physical and psychological health and with his relationships. Thus, as Magnusson and her 40-odd interviewees conclude that Bergman was a workaholic mass of contradictions, the audience is left to wonder whether he should continue to be feted as an artistic genius or whether he should be judged according to the tenets of the #MeToo and Time's Up campaigns. 

Few of the accusations that Magnusson makes are original and her film makes for fascinating comparison with another centenary study, Margarethe von Trotta's Searching for Ingmar Bergman. But she does make telling use of a 1972 conversation with American chat show host Dick Cavett and include snippets from the previously unseen 1980s interview with his brother, Dag (which Bergman had succeeded in suppressing during his lifetime), in which he reveals that he and not Ingmar had been mercilessly beaten by their Lutheran pastor father. Furthermore, she reveals that the twentysomething Bergman had been seduced by National Socialism during a stay in Germany and that he had continued to admire Adolf Hitler after the outbreak of the Second World War (in which Sweden remained neutral). 

Not content with depriving Bergman of the oft-claimed source of so much of his artistic angst, Magnusson also exposes him as a short-fused tyrant on the film set and as an abusive chauvinist in his relationships with lovers like Karin Lannby and Bibi Andersson, as well as with third wife Gun Grut and future spouses Käbi Laretei and Ingrid von Rosen, whom he met during the course of 1957. Yet, in suggesting that he was more honest about his shortcomings in his films than he was in memoirs like The Magic Lantern (1988) and Images: My Life in Film (1994), Magnusson also lauds the phenomenal energy (fuelled by yoghurt and Marie biscuits) that saw Bergman overcome the crippling pain of stomach ulcers to release two undisputed cinematic masterpieces, while also shooting So Close to Life and garnering rave reviews for his staging of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. 

Amidst anecdotes about his tyrannical rages (including one from Thorsten Flinck about their clash during the 1995 revival of Molière's The Misanthrope that feels entirely out of place), frequent collaborator and mother of one of Bergman's nine children, Liv Ullmann tries to protect his reputation. She also points to the mental scars left by the 1970s tax evasion scandal that drove Bergman into German exile and sapped his creative confidence. 

But in repeatedly flitting away from the eponymous annus mirabilis, Magnusson loses her focus. Moreover, she devotes so much time to events behind the scenes that she fails to provide a worthwhile critical analysis of Bergman's changing style and recurring thematic preoccupations, as he decided to make himself the subject (and confessional subtext) of his oeuvre. Thus, while this provides a timely reminder of the exploitative nature of so many major film-makers, it feels more gossipy and censorious than insightful and analytical.