Bergman: Det regnar på vår kärlek (It Rains on Our Love) (1946)

Like many of Bergman’s early films, It Rains on Our Love is about a pair of drifters. In this case, it’s David (Birger Malmsten), recently released from prison and Maggie (Barbro Kollberg), recently pregnant after a one-night stand. They’ve got little in common other than an inchoate yearning to arrive “somewhere” – and part of the power of Bergman’s vision is the way he manages to craft a narrative that doesn’t come from anywhere or go anywhere. It opens in a railway station and closes at a crossroads, while the first encounter between David and Maggie is too identified with the opening of the film to even be described as occurring in media res – it occurs in the middle of nothing, as we meet them at the exact instant they meet each other. As the film progresses, David and Maggi live out their love against transitional, transitory spaces, which prevents the stage-bound dialogue ever making the film feel theatrical, just because these spaces and sound stages are even more ephemeral and insubstantial than the theatrical stage. That recalls the B-noir developing in America at the same time – like so many noir characters, David and Birger live by night, desperately trying to put a dark past right, but confronted by bureacuracy at every turn, culminating with an infernal trial in which they’re accused by virtually every character they’ve tried to treat with dignity and respect. That makes for a fascinating combination of noir claustrophobia with Bergman’s nascent chamber aesthetic, but what’s most striking about the film is how vertiginously, even spontaneously, it oscillates between hope and despair. Perhaps more than any of Bergman’s other social realist dramas from this period, hope doesn’t feel like a straw man – it’s more than the mere canvas for despair. Instead, it feels like the film was written, and hoped, as it was shot – and the flipside of that hopefulness is a rawness and rage that’s quite surprising for those used to the supremely resigned pessimism and stylised existential angst of Bergman’s latter work. It makes for one of his most self-consciously political films – a protest film, really – and a materialist foundation to his later, free-floating angst. Even more extraordinarily, it produces something like a happy ending – certainly the happiest ending of any of Bergman’s tragedies – that doesn’t feel natural or allegorical so much as a sheer act of directorial will on Bergman’s part, perhaps explaining why he resorts to a supernatural avatar, who appears at key moments to expostulate on the characters, intercede in the drama and restore justice.