Erland Josephson could make a hurtful man sound entirely reasonable without concealing the damage. We rate him for that uncomfortable precision, though the warmth of Fanny and Alexander matters just as much.
Fi1m perspective
In Scenes from a Marriage (1974), Josephson's Johan sounds reasonable even while causing harm. Josephson never makes him conveniently monstrous, so we have to consider what he says rather than dismiss the man saying it. We winced at the familiarity of those conversations: he and Liv Ullmann make repeated misunderstanding between people who know each other well feel painfully ordinary. It is acting worth enduring some long and repetitive arguments for.
After returning to film with Ingmar Bergman in the late 1950s, Josephson concentrated on theatre before becoming the director's leading male actor in the 1970s. Cries and Whispers (1972), in which he plays David, belongs to that emergence, though our admiration for the film rests chiefly with its four women. The wider recognition came with Scenes from a Marriage, but the performance depends on giving Ullmann equal weight. Her Marianne needs to be understood, yet her own self-deception stops Johan from becoming the only person we are trying to work out.
Fanny and Alexander (1982) is a useful answer to the idea that Josephson only did educated unhappiness. His Isak Jacobi has warmth and liveliness within Bergman's funny, frightening family drama. We recommend the film strongly, with the reservation that Fanny deserves more attention than she receives. Josephson's contribution makes it harder to confuse the coldness of his other characters with a shortage of feeling in the actor.
The work away from Bergman was less consistent: Beyond Good and Evil (1977) and Montenegro (1981) suggest how easily he could be confined to eccentric or unpleasant figures. Andrei Tarkovsky put his convincing melancholy to work in Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). He returned to Johan in Bergman's Saraband (2003). For the clearest sense of what he could do, start with Scenes from a Marriage and give Ullmann equal attention.
Biography
Erland Josephson (15 June 1923 – 25 February 2012) was a Swedish actor, author and director. He appeared in numerous films directed by Ingmar Bergman, including The Magician (1958), Cries and Whispers (1972), Scenes from a Marriage (1974), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Fanny and Alexander (1982), in which he played Isak Jacobi. He also featured in Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986).
Josephson had a long stage career, serving as artistic director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm from 1966 to 1975. He wrote screenplays with Bergman under the joint pseudonym Buntel Ericsson and directed several films himself, including Marmalade Revolution (1980). He was also known for work with directors such as Theodoros Angelopoulos and Liv Ullmann.
