The Best Intentions

Ingmar Bergman stopped directing features after Fanny and Alexander but did not stop writing, and in 1991 he handed Bille August a screenplay about the courtship and early marriage of his own parents, Erik Bergman and Karin Åkerblom. August — who had already won the Palme d'Or for Pelle the Conqueror — won it again in 1992, one of only a handful of directors to do so twice, and Pernilla August took Best Actress.

Samuel Fröler plays Henrik, a theology student whose poverty is inseparable from his pride, and Pernilla August plays Anna, whose family's disapproval is expressed through impeccable courtesy. Max von Sydow appears as her father and Ghita Nørby as her mother, in a household where every kindness is also a manoeuvre. It was shot for Swedish television by Jörgen Persson and exists in both a 182-minute feature cut and a longer four-part version.

The material is Bergman's — a marriage examined without mercy, faith as an inheritance rather than a comfort — but the treatment is August's, patient and unshowy, and the film gains from the distance. It was largely unseen outside Scandinavia after its festival year, which makes it the least-known Palme d'Or of the modern era and the most straightforward gap in this catalogue.