Few people can be put out with Ingmar Bergman for having not kept his promise that Fanny and Alexander would remain his last movie. Still, Bergman has felt obliged to argue, with perhaps an overrefined sense of integrity, that inasmuch as After the Rehearsal was made originally for Swedish television, it does not really qualify as a movie and cannot be said to have supplanted Fanny. Well, the obvious rejoinder is that Bergman had made movies for Swedish television before, and without notifying anyone that they were not to be counted as movies when exported as such abroad. In fact one of those movies, Scenes from a Marriage, had been counted by many to be among the best of his movies, and it would be a pity to have to evict it from that company retroactively. And yet there is a sense in which we might agree with Bergman that the present movie is no movie: not because it was made for television, although that medium might account for the graininess of the image (not even Sven Nykvist, Bergman's trusted cinematographer, can do much to disguise blown-up 16-millimeter), as well as for the profusion, just as in Scenes from a Marriage, of talk-show closeups. No: if After the Rehearsal is not quite a movie, the reason is rather that it is -- to borrow a word which the protagonist, an eminent Swedish theatrical director, uses to rebuke both of the actresses who complete this three-character chamber piece -- so "stagy." In both conception and execution, there is nothing here that could not have been done as well, or better, on stage -- which is where, after all, the action takes place. That handicap aside, the characters can nonetheless hold your interest, whether or not you are tempted to see merciless self-revelation in the fact that the protagonist here happens to have the same vocation as Bergman. In any event, it is Ingrid Thulin -- for many years, but not at all recent years, one of the mainstays of the Bergman repertory company -- who scores highest for self-revelation, most particularly in her hiking up of skirt and blouse to expose thighs and breasts far less ravaged by time than her sad doughy face. With her, the correspondence between fiction and fact is painfully open to inspection; and the effect on the viewer, or anyway on the Bergman veteran, is devastation. Erland Jospehson, Lena Olin. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd