The Best Intentions.

* The Best Intentions is Ingmar Bergman's account of his parents' precarious courtship and toilsome first decade of marriage. As directed by Bille August, the Dane who gave us Pelle the Conqueror, it won the Grand Prize at Cannes, a prize gravely compromised by the likes of sex, lies, and videotape, Wild at Heart, and Barton Fink. This time the jury did not rink out, though the film does have its problems.

The work, initially a six-hour TV mini-series, is now edited down to a three-hour movie, pretty much as was the case with one of Bergman's masterpieces, Scenes from a Marriage, which, however, was no longer a masterpiece in its final 158-minute trimming. Fanny and Alexander, the last solo cinematic venture by Bergman, similarly suffered from shrinkage. The Best Intentions, whose full-length version I haven't seen, does not exactly feel like disjecta membra, which is good; but neither does one feel the steady presence of the poeta, which is not so good.

After many troubles with social inequality, ill health, family disapproval, and a rival relationship, the upper-class and snobbish (but otherwise charming) Anna Akerblom marries the impoverished, tormented, indecisive Henrik Bergman, first a starveling divinity student, then a minister who takes his bride to a godforsaken northern parish, where he becomes the assistant pastor. They have their contretemps and even major fights, but they stick it out through the birth and childhood of a son, and are expecting another child (the future Ingmar), when an offer comes from the Queen (a splendid cameo by Anita Bjork) for Pastor Bergman to become chaplain of the Royal Hospital. Henrik refuses to leave his working-class parishioners, whereupon Anna leaves him. But there is a final reconciliation.

It is instructive to compare The Best Intentions with that other scrutiny of a conjugal mine field, Scenes from a Marriage, and so figure out the reasons for the current shortfall. The easy (and insufficient) answer would be that Bergman is a better director than August; but Pelle the Conqueror was no mean achievement without any help from Bergman.

The main problem is that there is not much change in either Henrik and Anna or their circumstances as they lead to an ending predictable for anyone with the slightest knowledge of Bergman's life. The only real conflicts involve Nordenson, an atheistic manufacturer who does not want his daughters confirmed, and a strange young boy, Petrus, who seeks shelter from a harsh family with the Bergmans, but to whom Anna cannot really warm up, especially when her second child is on the way. In the three-hour version, at any rate, neither of these

plot elements achieves sufficient dramatic stature. In the uncut version, the political struggle of the exploited factory workers, barely touched upon here, and the more fleshed-out presences of colorful townfolk may have enhanced the atmosphere and texture.

And whereas Scenes enjoyed the freedom of fiction, Intentions is saddled with the constraints of biography. In the cut version, moreover, the colorful lesser members of the Akerblom clan get much less of a chance to add to the film's ambience and aroma. Even the kind but ailing paterfamilias, beautifully played by Max von Sydow (whose very face seems to have so filled up with lived and acted experience that it is an eloquent scenario in itself), is here shortchanged. Ghita Norby, the Danish actress playing Anna's mother, comes off best, but in a rather monochromatic role. The delightful Lena Endre, who plays Henrik's supposedly older, working-class mistress, inappositely looks (and probably is) younger than the heroine.

Samuel Froler, as Henrik, is not a bad actor, but must, without much personal magnetism, play a rebarbative personage. As for Pernilla August (Ostergren before she married the director, when she dazzled us on the New York stage with her Ophelia and Nora), she is saddled with a role nearly too noble. And, though neither pretty nor young enough, she has such talent, presence, and inner beauty as to unintentionally overshadow her partner. One misses the complex, evenly matched characters and performers of Scenes from a Marriage. Still, there are the achingly authentic psychological details, the intricate social and gender balances and imbalances, and the striking land- and cityscapes poignantly photographed by Jorgen Persson (who did such masterly work for Bo Widerberg's movies): enough to make this a rewarding, adult movie, a rare thing in our era of infantilism.