Free The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded by David Thomson Page B

Schwartzman—not forgetting older players (like Anjelica Huston and Bill Murray). So far, so good. Watch this space.
    Alas, The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited did not fill or occupy this space—they lost it. These are two pretty awful films, and I see no reason not to say that. The mealymouthed praise they have had from Anderson loyalists will serve no purpose. Fantastic Mr. Fox is a far more effective and old-fashioned film, but one that leaves great doubt about what Anderson wants to do.
    So what should we conclude? I think the comparison with Paul Thomas Anderson is a signal. PTA’s films have been odd and disconcerting at times, but overall they leave no doubt about the maker’s sense of trying to make films in a time of immense physical and cultural crisis. By contrast, WA seems to exist at the far end of a very private, isolating corridor.
    So watch this space.
    Bibi Andersson (Birgitta Andersson), b. Stockholm, Sweden, 1935
Although Bibi Andersson was married to one director, Kjell Grede—for whom she has never filmed—our impressions of Bibi Andersson have been radically affected by another, to whom she seems to be spiritually committed: Ingmar Bergman. They first worked together when she was only seventeen and appeared in a television commercial for soap directed by Bergman. That effect of scrubbed, cheerful cleanliness took some time to wear off. She trained at the Royal Theatre, Stockholm, from 1954–56, and was already making small appearances in films: Dum-Bom (53, Nils Poppe); En Natt pa Glimmingehus (54, Torgny Wickman); Herr Arnes Penngar (54, Gustaf Molander); a bit part in Smiles of a Summer Night (55, Bergman); Sista Paret Ut (56, Alf Sjoberg); Egen Ingang (56, Hasse Ekman); and Sommarnoje Sokes (57, Ekman). She then played the wife in the pair of fairground innocents (the husband being Nils Poppe) who survive the apocalypse in The Seventh Seal (57, Bergman).
    She offered at this time little more than the vague, childish prettiness that symbolized hope in Bergman’s most pretentious and hollow period. Similarly, in Wild Strawberries (57, Bergman), she was one of the young hikers who brings comfort to the dying Isak Borg. In that film, Andersson seemed a lightweight beside the anguished Ingrid Thulin. She was more seriously tested as the prospective mother of an illegitimate child in So Close to Life (58, Bergman), but had only a small, repertory part in The Face (58, Bergman).
    At about this time, she went back to the theatre and made only one film in 1959: Den Kara Leken (Kenne Fant). She was the virgin who irritates Satan in The Devil’s Eye (60, and one of Bergman’s more playful films). Over the next five years she waited to mature—or so it seems in hindsight: to Yugoslavia for Nasilje Na Trgu (61, Alf Kjellin); into a new sexual frankness with The Mistress (62, Vilgot Sjoman); Kort ar Sommaren (62, Bjarne Henning-Jensen); On (64, Sjoberg, not released until 66); one of Bergman’s women in Now About These Women (64); Juninatt (65, Lars-Erik Liedholm); uselessly to America for Duel at Diablo (65, Ralph Nelson).
    She needed such a holiday to prepare for one of the most harrowing female roles the screen has presented: Nurse Alma in Persona (66, Bergman). That this masterpiece owed so much to Bibi Andersson was acknowledgment of her greater emotional experience. She was thirty now, and in that astonishing scene where Liv Ullmann and she look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and Ullmann arranges Andersson’s hair, it is as if Bergman were saying, “Look what time has done. Look what a creature this is.” Alma talks throughout Persona but is never answered, so that her own insecurity and instability grow. Technically the part calls for domination of timing, speech, and movement that exposes the chasms in the soul. And it was in showing that breakdown, in reliving Alma’s experience of the orgy on the beach years before, in deliberately leaving glass on the gravel, and in