Två människor

Carl Theodor Dreyer has spoiled us with his films. After seeing Ordet, Gertrud, Vampyr, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc and Dies Irae I don't expected this great surprise.

Tva manniskor is a film Dreyer make ten years before Ordet and it has much to do. The film is developed in just 73 minutes and what catches my attention is that all time the action happens in 4 walls. Maybe two decorated: The Lundell's lounge and the bedroom.

Like I said before, I'm surprised as a movie like that is going trapping with its plot, that is simple but at the same time involves multiple edges and secret relations. What I like about the movie is the long shots that Dreyer do of the two lovers looking ahead and talking about love and death. These long shots finish with kisses with lots of love and often the camera forward movements as we will see in Ordet, where the camera gives a twist around the characters and is enveloping them.

I liked this film and I advise people see it. The final is very surprising.

This film was a complete failure, and disowned by Dreyer, who later refused to acknowledge its existence. It rarely appears in Dreyer filmographies or retrospectives, and is not typically discussed by critics. For the longest time almost no one had seen it. The only copy was in the Swedish Film Institute archives. It has been published on VHS and DVD. It is still little known and only has 115 votes here on IMDb, the lowest of all his feature films.

The film was made in Sweden (and in Swedish) between Day of Wrath and Ordet. It is based on a play by W.O. Somin and was meant as an experiment. Dreyer wanted to make the pure and ultimate chamber drama, where everything would take place in one room. A young researcher (Arne Lundell) is accused of plagiarizing the work of an older rival (Professor Sander). He comes home to his wife Marianne and wants to give up. No one believes in his innocence. Then they hear that Professor Sander has been killed and everything points to Arne Lundell being the killer.

We only see Arne and Marianne in the film, except for one flashback where we see the shadow of Sander. This is also the only time the camera leaves the apartment of Arne and Marianne. Dreyer breaks most rules in this film. In his camera placements, Dreyer pays no heed to eye lines and plot axes, and consequently some of the film's cuts appear to break the classical conventions of dialog editing. This makes the film quite expressionistic. The expressionism is taken to an extrema in the flashback when we only see the deformed shadow of Sander, like something out of Nosferatu (1922) by Murnau.

Dreyer did not get the actors he wanted and said that the ones he got had all the wrong qualities. Arne was supposed to have been delicate and naive, Marianne hot-blooded and erotically experienced. Instead, he was forced to use two actors with the exact opposite qualities.

He had also decided to cut out the flashback scene and replace it with dialog. The producer put the scene back in and added a melodramatic score without Dreyers consent. Dreyer subsequently disowned the film and it was never shown outside Sweden.

While this is not a masterpiece it is far from bad. We can see Dreyer work out some of the technique (camera movements) he would use in Ordet, it has some quite nice scenes and it is suspenseful. I did guess the plot but the film still managed to surprise me in the end. It is also beautifully filmed, with a soft dreamy aura, obtained by pulling a lady stockings over the lens. This film is well worth your time!

Made immediately after Dreyer's magnificent Day of Wrath, Två människor is the one movie that Dreyer completely disowned. This happens from time to time. Kubrick famously disowned Spartacus and Lynch disowned Dune. There were questions of authorship around both, and the same goes for Dreyer's work here. Hired by Svensk Filmindustri to adapt the play "Attentat" by W. O. Somin, Dreyer was stymied from the start. He wasn't allowed to hire the actors he wanted. He was forced to film a flashback scene he didn't want in the film. The producer added a score he hated and didn't feel was appropriate. That doesn't really have much to do with how an audience should view the end product, which ends up a middling exercise in proto-Swedish dramas that Ingmar Bergman would ultimately excel at.

It's about a married couple, Marianna (Wanda Rothgardt) and Arne (Georg Rydeberg) and the tense day they experience after Arne's professional life begins to crumble with accusations that his seminal paper on schizophrenia was plagiarized from a colleague, the never seen Sander. The day is a rollercoaster of emotion as Arne thinks his professional life is over, only to hear on the radio that Sander committed suicide that day. Refreshed with this news that Arne is ashamed to admit he enjoys hearing, Marianne is supportive and dreams of the secure future they will now have.

More news comes over the radio that most likely Sander didn't commit suicide, but that he was murdered. The gun used to kill him is the same model as the gun that Arne had registered with the police as his own, but he didn't commit the murder even though he had been outside Sander's house at roughly that time, pacing back and forth wondering if he should confront the man trying to destroy him. He doesn't have any blood on his clothes, though, so he knows that he's in the clear. Marriane has a secret, though. She killed Sander, and the reasons aren't exactly terribly surprising.

The thing about this movie is that it feels really routine. This is a film about two people discovering crimes of passion and hidden pasts, and nothing feels generally shocking. It doesn't feel right that a relationship drama is so rote. There's a revelation halfway through where Marianne reveals that she had a relationship with Sander before she met Arne. That's standard stuff (not even an affair during, mind you, just that they were a couple beforehand), but then the film makes too much of it. Never mind the melodramatic score, this scene was written all wrong. The police are encircling closer on this murder that they know they have some likelihood of being tied to, and Arne suddenly makes it a huge priority to dig up his wife's previous love life and even goes so far as to announce that he's divorcing her. It's all off.

The movie recovers its feet just enough to keep going once this temper tantrum is over and Marianne is allowed to detail the events that led to Sander's plagiarism of Arne (not the other way around), his attempt at blackmail of Marianne to get her to divorce Arne and marry Sander, and her eventual visit to Sander's house where she killed him with Arne's gun.

It's fine. It's not exactly good, but it functions. I can easily see why Dreyer would look at the final product with all the compromises he had to face and just say that it wasn't his. The final product away from the authorship question is like an early, almost amateur version of Scenes from a Marriage with a murder plot thrown in.

I will note, though, that Dreyer shoots the single set extraordinarily well. Never feeling limited visually, he keeps moving his actors around throughout the film with individual pockets of the film occupying different physical pockets of the two-bedroom apartment. There's not a whole lot to recommend of the film, though. It's surprisingly thin and light for what should be a strongly penetrative dual character piece. The central section is dominated by a conflict that feels wrong and out of place. However, the actors are fine, it's never visually boring or repetitive, and it moves quickly for what it is.

Dreyer's rarest talkie, it was a flop upon release and was later dismissed by its director and has rarely played even at retrospectives. I finally got a hold of it, and it's pretty easy to see why. It's crud. You definitely have to wonder how an artist as excellent as Carl Dreyer had anything to do with it. Two People concerns, you guessed it, two people, a married couple (Georg Rydeberg and Wanda Rothgardt). Pretty much the entire thing takes place in their living room (with a couple of quick trips to a lab somewhere else in their house and a flashback to a place that looks remarkably similar to their living room). Rydeberg has been accused of plagiarism by a famous doctor, but early on in the film the couple learns that the accuser has passed away. There is some relief, but that quickly turns to fear as it is revealed the doctor was murdered and Rydeberg is the main suspect. The script here is pretty clunky, and Rydeberg isn't much of an actor. Rothgardt fares a bit better. There are some twists that are both kind of predictable but also don't make much sense. It is definitely best left forgotten. If you are curious, though, a company called Video Dimensions has released it on DVD (of poor but acceptable quality) and one can find it on Amazon. 4/10.