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Often married and more often involved, Bergman seems to draw new strength and youth from each affair. With Liv as his star and companion, he moved into a new creative phase. His pictures became less theological, less concerned with God, man, and the devil, and more concerned with people, especially women. This whole trend is culminated in his latest film, Cries and Whispers, which has yet to be released in either Sweden or the U.S.
Yet if Bergman uses women, they gain at least as much from him. "Ingmar gave me much more self-confidence than I had before," says Liv. "He listened to me. Living with him enriched me. I matured. The world I lived in with my husband was smaller, mostly of neighbors and close friends. With Ingmar's friends I had to sharpen up and find my own identity."
Lasting Trauma. Shortly after they met, Liv became pregnant. "I let it happen," she says. "I wasn't afraid. I felt it was very right." The baby, a girl whom they named Linn, was born during the filming of Hour of the Wolf. Liv, who is enough of a cold-blooded professional to watch herself constantly through a sort of invisible mirror, noted her cries and groans for future reference when she next would play a woman in labor.
Many Norwegians, less sexually liberated than their Swedish neighbors, were scandalized by Liv's unmarried motherhood. They harassed her in much the same way as Americans had harassed Ingrid Bergman 22 years before. Letters came in denouncing her as a sinner and a whore. Some told her that she should take the baby into the woods and leave it; others kindly suggested that she should kill herself as well. The Lutheran Church refused to allow the baby to be baptized. Liv went on Norwegian TV to defend her action in an emotion-charged statement. Though she still believes she acted morally and honestly in not marrying Bergman—"I feel it would be very difficult to twice stand and say to God you will love one another"—the uproar was obviously a painful and lasting trauma.
The Swedes were less concerned about the couple's morality than the Norwegians, but they were morbidly curious to see Bergman's newest companion. Tourists from Stockholm would take boat trips to the island for a glimpse of Liv; when Bergman built a high stone wall around the house, the tourists countered by bringing light metal ladders along from the mainland. It was the first of several strains that life on Fårö was to entail for Liv.
Too Complicated. The stark isolation of the place made her feel cut off from things. "When my girl friend and I quarrel and she wants to go away and she is all packed," Bergman told one interviewer matter of factly, "everything is always too complicated. First she has to drive by a very complicated way through the woods. Then the ferry boat leaves only on the hour. From there she has to find a flight. So she ends up staying."