THE PACKRAT: Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words – film review

Every ten years, movie starlet Ingrid Bergman changed her life: countries, husbands, studios, directors and sometimes children. She loved life, and lived it to the fullest, often to the chagrin of complacent society, but always to the utter delight of the paparazzi.

In an exhaustive two-hours, Stig Bjorkman gathers together endless streams of photographs, film clips, home movies and diary passages, from movie’s biggest packrat. We are whisked from Sweden, to America, to Italy, to some island that I can’t remember anymore. It’s all quite dizzying. Her children speak fondly of her joie de vivre, and the all too brief time she actually spent raising them.

Bergman was truly an original, an actor who sandwiched a couple of Oscar nods with an eight year “penance” exile, for her indiscretions.

It’s all rather engrossing, for about an hour. But rather repetitive after that.

In the end, this document is but a very large canvas brimming with juicy stories, desperately in need of a ruthless editor.