A Woman’s Face suggests an intriguing alternative career for Ingrid Bergman—one built less on romantic intrigue and more on femme-fatale ferocity. In this early star turn while still in Sweden, Bergman plays Anna Holm, leader of an underworld crew of con artists and blackmailers. A childhood survivor of a fire that killed her parents, Anna bears the facial scars from the tragedy—her lips pulled up to bare her teeth, the skin beneath her left eye drooping to create a ghastly glare—and she has a snarling personality to match. Yet after reconstructive surgery, Anna seems to have a change of heart as well, which threatens her gang’s latest and most brazen plot—to murder the child heir of a vast estate. Director Gustaf Molander, who gave Bergman her first starring role in 1936’s Intermezzo, turns the movie’s post-surgery sequence into a clever collection of camera angles and blocking choices, teasing us with the reveal of the beauteous Bergman a number of ways and then not delivering. (We won’t see her face in full until a scene or two later.) As for Bergman herself, she’s fully convincing as the rough-and-tumble ringleader, though her best moment is in a scene of the sort we’d come to associate with her later. At this point, Anna is posing as governess for Lars-Erik (Goran Bernhard), the boy who has been targeted by her crew. Surprised by a sudden, squeezing hug around the neck from the tyke, Anna steps back in surprise. Her hair mussed and covering her face, she sweeps it away, revealing an expression of startled transformation. Torn between her criminal past and her caring potential, Anna exists in that mysterious, Bergman in-between. A Woman’s Face, adapted from a play by the Belgian-born French writer Francis de Croisset, was remade in Hollywood by George Cukor, with Joan Crawford in the Anna part. (No surprise, but Crawford was even more convincing as a criminal willing to entertain the murder of a kid.)
(2/17/2023)