Both Ingrid Bergman and Ana María Matute managed to escape the stereotype of a faithful wife, a good mother and an impeccable woman.
But the price was high: both had to give up seeing their children for too long.
It is said that it was the drive to achieve the sublime that led Ingrid Bergman to write one of the most famous letters in cinema: “Dear Mr. Rossellini, I have seen your films
Roma,
Open City and
Paisá
and I have enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who does not understand much French and who can only say I love you in Italian, I am ready to travel and make a film with you. Ingrid Bergman ”.
That letter, which of course dazzled the Italian director, would change the actress's life. Not only did Roberto Rossellini (suddenly) need a Swedish actress, but he invited Bergman to shoot, not long after,
Stromboli
(1952). During the filming they fell in love, they had an idyll and she became pregnant. At the time, Ingrid was married to the Swedish neurosurgeon, Petter Lindstrom, and had a ten-year-old daughter, Pia, with whom she lived in Beverly Hills. When he made the decision to go live with the Italian director in Rome, he was at the peak of his career - he had triumphed for ten years in Hollywood with films like
Casablanca
(1942),
Gaslight
(1945) or
Joan of Arc
(1948), and in Europe she was one of Hitchock's favorite actresses - but she was not happy either with her husband or with her life.
"Something had died inside me", he would say in one of his letters, "something was missing in my work, in my life at home ... in fact in all my life."
Some rebels taught us that the essence of women is not necessarily to be a mother and wife, but to be free and happy.
Rossellini offered both a passport to freedom and the promise of a new creative life. But the price was very high: on the one hand, the puritanical American society of the 50s, for whom Bergman had always been the faultless woman, of upright morality, happy wife and mother, felt betrayed, and she fell on him. On the other hand - and this was, in his own words, the hardest part - not getting Lindstrom's permission, he had to give up seeing his daughter for too long, which caused him to feel remorse and guilt.
The beautiful documentary Family
Portrait
(can be seen in Filmin)
accounts for all this and much more
, interwoven thanks to the large number of memories that the actress was kind enough to keep (filming from her childhood, letters and diaries), as well as the testimony of his four children.
Bergman's determination to build his life from his own desire, and not from the expectations of others (a husband, a son or society itself), together with the vital passion and energy that emanate from the character, especially call attention.
Ingrid Bergman with her three children, in Paris in 1957.Bettmann / Collection / CORBIS
It also reminded me of another public figure, in this case Spanish: the writer Ana María Matute, who when making the decision to separate from her husband in 1963, the writer Ramón Eugenio de Goicochea, was also "punished" without being able to see his son Juan Pablo for years. I think that with their determination and courage, they both demonstrated the true fight for freedom. Without the need to raise banners or be part of any group (Matute, in fact, did not consider herself a feminist), they defended their ideas through their own life, which is what it stings the most.
So much so that when Bergman went to shoot in Rome, the letters of condemnation began to rain. The vice president and director of Production Codes, Joseph Breen, asked him to deny the rumors that he was about to divorce and abandon his first daughter to marry Rossellini. It was criticized by the Lutheran Church of Sweden and priests of the Catholic Church, especially in the United States; She also received letters from anonymous people who called her whore or told her things like that she would burn in hell for all eternity, that the child was the son of the devil, that she would be born dead or be hunchbacked. In the midst of this gibberish of criticism and reproach, there were, however, noteworthy gestures such as that of Hemingway, one of the few friends who sent a letter giving his blessing to the couple:"If you have quintuplets," he told them, "I can go to the Vatican and be the best man."
The case of Ana María Matute, although different, has points in common. Since at the time there was no possibility in Spain, he did not get divorced. Tired of putting up with her husband, who was not working and wasting the money she earned (the last straw was when he sold his typewriter), she decided to quit. As a result of Spanish law, Matute had no right to see her son, since her husband obtained guardianship. But he cared very little for the child. So when he saw that it would no longer serve to blackmail her, he left it to his mother. Thanks to the intervention of her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law, Ana María was able to spend some Saturdays with her son: they went to the cinema or the theater, so Juan Pablo would always be her “little boy on Saturdays” for the author. All this ended up being reflected in his work.Beneath Matute's writing beats a sense of loss or absence (“I had never imagined that absence took up so much space,” he said, “much more than any presence”), but there is also a powerful undercurrent, a deaf longing for happiness. Through nonconformist and rebellious characters, she helped us understand that the true essence of women is not necessarily to be a faithful mother and wife, but rather to be free and happy.
Ingrid Bergman also transferred her struggle to art.
In the words of her daughter Pia, there was something in the story of Joan of Arc (which she represented several times in the cinema and in the theater) that attracted her obsessively: “a young girl who hears a voice that tells her she is going to do extraordinary things ”.
The trouble was that, like the French heroine, who ended up at the stake as a witch, to achieve her freedom, Ingrid had to be branded a whore and burned in the flames of public punishment.
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