Ingrid Bergman was too classy to write anything as coarse as “Come and get me, big boy”. And yet, reading the fan-girl correspondence she sent to Roma, Open City director Roberto Rossellini, there can no mistaking her intentions. “… If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only “ti amo,” I am ready to come and make a film with you.”
When Bergman left her first husband Petter Lindstrom – not to mention their young daughter Pia - to conduct a very public affair with Rossellini, she was denounced from the floor of the United States Senate. She went on to have three children with Rossellini: Ingrid, Isotta and Roberto Jr, all of whom are present for this epistolary documentary tribute.
Reading from Bergman’s correspondence, Alicia Vikander channels this paradoxically cool-headed free-spirit: “It is as if a bird of passage lived within me,“ writes Bergman.
Her adult offspring mostly express adoration and bemusement, although, as Pia notes, children clearly bored Ingrid; when she and Rossellini parted ways, the children were left with carers in their own home while mum and dad moved on to new marriages.
If they’re bitter, it doesn’t show in this largely uncritical portrait. Isabella notes that her mother’s relationships with the men who filmed her can be traced back to her earliest years, when she lost her much-adored father, a photographer. Pia notes a similar pattern: “She was madly in love with Victor Fleming,” she says of her mother’s relationship with the director of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. “But once the movie was over that was it.”
Thank goodness for the cooperation of the Bergman clan. Where the similarly themed Listen to Me Marlon utilised the recordings of Marlon Brando to wide-ranging effect, Ingrid Bergman’s letters display a certain coyness. Her frontline affair with war photographer Robert Capa is, like many other episodes, romantically framed: “We’ve fallen in love.”
She can humble-brag: “There’s a rumour that I’m the greatest talent around and that the studios are fighting for me.”
It would have been nice to have examined more of Bergman’s odd transatlantic career – glimpses of an early screen test can only be described as ravishing – but classic Hollywood buffs will be well-served, nonetheless.
