ON AN ISLAND WITH INGMAR

"WHAT IF" AND OTHER CONUNDRUMS.

Ingmar Bergman.

            It jolted me a little, at the opening of A Man Named Otto, a remake of the successful En Man som heter Ove, to see, amid the gaudy identifiers of its other producers, the austere emblem of Svensk Filmindustri, Sweden's government-supported studio at which the original was filmed.

In the 'sixties, no cinema was more respected than the Swedish, due in large part to the starkly moral films of Ingmar Bergman. To a film-struck young Australian holding down a job at the government documentary studio, the prospect of visiting Sweden seemed almost absurdly remote - which made me hesitant to apply for a fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, established in memory of the late British prime minister to finance such educational trips.

But the then-National Librarian agreed to be one of my sponsors, assuring me that my having recently produced a prize-winning short film and written the first history of the Australian film industry made my selection a foregone conclusion.

Imagine my reaction, then, when I wasn't only turned down, but turned down in favour of Simon, a colleague with, to my mind at least, inferior credentials.

True, Simon had also made a prize-winning film, and his film reviews on local TV were suavely competent, but even so….

I tried not to grind my teeth as he outlined his itinerary. First to Stockholm, hopefully to meet the reclusive Bergman. Then on to Rome for breakfast with Féderico Fellini (Breakfast! with Fellini!), followed by encounters in London with such directors as Lindsay Anderson and Ken Russell…

For more than a year I'd thought about leaving Australia for Europe but Simon's success galvanized me. I wrote on the studio's letter-headed paper to every continental film festival, advising that I would shortly be embarking on a fact-finding tour of Europe, and soliciting their assistance. A number invited me to attend as their guest, and two, in Finland and Ireland, to serve on their juries.

As my girlfriend and I couldn't afford the air fare enjoyed by Simon, we took a cabin on one of the converted pre-war ocean liners plying the thirty-day route to Europe, after which I made a lone trip to Tampere in ice-bound Finland, where I was to join the festival's jury, among whose other members was...Lindsay Anderson!

The director of If… and This Sporting Life wasn't the most amiable of men, so it didn't surprise me that my query about how he'd got on with Simon was met with a frown and a curt shake of the head.

I never intended to follow in Simon's footsteps, but there was, in retrospect, an eerie predictability in the way that, almost as soon as I arrived in Britain, my path crossed that of Ken Russell whose biography I would write - by chance, I met the priest who was his confessor - and that, years later, I'd find myself at Café Canova on the Piazza de Popoli in Rome, having breakfast with Fellini- whose sister I'd happened to meet in his home town of Rimini- and about whom I also wrote a book.  

I commented on the coincidences to Simon when, many years later, we met in Paris.

"You'll laugh," I told him, "but I really envied you that Churchill fellowship. If I hadn't lost out to you, I'm not sure I would ever have left Australia."

Simon looked down at his feet but said nothing.

"And how strange, that I should almost immediately meet Lindsay Anderson in Finland," I went on, "because I know how much you were looking forward to that. He was a bit frosty with me. How did you get two get on?"

Simon sighed. With the expression of someone who has just swallowed something unpleasant, he said "I never met him."

"Oh? Well, how about Bergman?"

"Him either," he said. "Look, I might as well own up. Stockholm was my first stop. The Svensk Filmindustri people met me at the airport, took me to the hotel, and the man they'd assigned to me explained that the next day we'd be going to that island of Bergman's, with the sheep…."

"Fårö…"

"Yeah, Fårö…and…. well, I just…lost it. I mean, Ingmar Bergman? What do you say to a man like that? 'Nice place you've got here. How many sheep do you run to the hectare?'"

He shook his head. "I told them there was a family emergency and got the next plane back to Sydney. Fellini and Russell and the others…I never met any of them."

Simon's revelations didn't induce any particular satisfaction; just new doubts to add to the others that come with age. Acting out of envy and resentment changed my life. What if I'd stayed in Australia; formed other relationships, followed a different career… I might have become a better man, if a less successful one. "The last temptation is the greatest treason," wrote T.S. Eliot. "To do the right deed for the wrong reason." Or was it all, as Carl Gustav Jung suggested, destined to take place?  Issues one might profitably have discussed with Ingmar Bergman.  I suspect he'd have understood.