Even in Sweden, with its tradition of small 'l’ liberal sexual values, the opening scenes of Ingmar Bergman’s second film must have seemed very bold in 1946. Maggi (Barbro Kollberg) and David (Birger Malmsten) are an impoverished young couple who without any great fuss sleep together shortly after meeting in a railway waiting room - they missed the last train and have nowhere else to go, as her seducer (an ex-convict, unbeknownst to her) conveniently reminds her.
The next day the two outsiders stay together and shortly afterwards break into a deserted cottage on an allotment during a rainy night. Despite being nearly arrested, they strike a deal with the landlord and start to live together, by now in love. Both are determined to put their difficulties behind them and become model citizens, but the forces of a hypocritical, conservative society erect obstacles at every step of the path. True love, though, will out, perhaps surprising given the director’s later penchant for gloom.
Though clearly a flawed film, It Rains on Our Love should be of interest to world cinema enthusiasts, particularly Bergman aficionados. Apart from the bold treatment of premarital sex – unthinkable in the Hollywood films of the era, due to the Hays Code – the use of an omniscient narrator (Gösta Cederlund) on screen demonstrates that Bergman was thinking in self-referential terms a full 20 years ahead of his modernist touches in Persona. This character not only observes and comments upon the narrative within the same frame as the lead characters, acting as a kind of Greek chorus, but even steps into the drama to alter the course of events.
Less happy are the (luckily occasional) comedy sequences, the couple’s turn to insipidness niceness around the mid-point, and the ultimately naïve and heavy-handed way in which Bergman hammers home his message about the victimisation of the poor. Still, despite these faults there are early signs of the cinematic visual sense that the filmmaker would go onto develop with such confidence, especially in the first half hour.
The DVD comes with no extras (unless you count Madman trailers) while the sleeve notes are nearly impossible to read.
