The Touch bilingual version restored (spoiler alert)

The Touch was shown last night at the London Film Festival in a newly restored version, and I was lucky to be in the audience. This is the bilingual version, unseen for years with the scenes with Eliot Gould in English and the scenes between the Max von Sydow and Bibi Anderson in Swedish. I can only speculate, but I expect once this print has done the rounds there'll be a DVD release.

According to the gentleman from the British Film Institute who introduced it, the Swedish scenes were also shot in English for distribution in US, UK etc. The all-English cut is the one most regularly seen, including on Swedish TV in the 70s and 80s. It seems Swedish viewers heard the married Swedish couple conversing in private in English, which they found faintly ludicrous; this possibly contributed to the movie's poor reputation.

The restoration was from a number of sources, most crucially a 16mm print of the bilingual version from Bergman's own archive. The film was a bit grainy, although there wasn't much damage, scratches and suchlike. The sound was okay, although a bit bass-y and tended to boom a bit in the cinema . However, it was quite watchable.

How did it fare? Well, to me it certainly wasn't as bad as its reputation sometimes suggests. It was slightly overstretched and it lost something towards the end. It felt at times to be an experiment that led onto the less stylised change of tone Bergman achieved with Scenes from a Marriage, but it was certainly interesting for itself. The use of music was unusual for Bergman with a over-lyrical piano melody akin to some sort of pastoral folk melody used repeatedly. More wry was the ironic use of a lightweight pop instrumental against the scenes of Andersson hoovering, cleaning and generally being the 'modern housewife' of the times. Neither seemed typical of Bergman.

The dialogue was sometimes ludicrous, particularly early in the movie, when the audience was chuckling in disbelief. I do wonder if this was deliberate, as the tone moved from light to something much darker as the movie progressed.

However, the characters were complex and quite dark. Gould was clearly the most damaged and cruel, with mood swings and bursts of savage anger. Near the end we discover he has a physical ailment - Bergman often used illness as a sign of spiritual malaise or anguish. Andersson's love addiction to Gould is all the more compelling for his cruelty - he is often repulsive but she seems to find him more alive than her housewife lifestyle with loving husband and kids. But often you question how stable her character is to be drawn to such a person. Her flaw, her inability to choose, eventually leads to a self-imposed solitude and you really believe that she doesn't know what she wants.

I couldn't decide about Gould's acting, often criticised. His character is so unusual and unnatural that it's difficult to necessarily blame the acting when it feels unreal.

So, to my mind a minor work but still worth watching. And perhaps there'll be a DVD release soon...