When his first film, Crisis (1946), was generally regarded as a disaster, Ingmar Bergman was forced to realize, on approaching the age of 28, that while he boasted plenty of self-taught ability he still had much to learn about how to use it. In despair, he was also in luck: three men were prepared to guide him through the mistakes, the experiments, and the precarious successes of the next decade. On stage, Torsten Hammarén, the director of Gothenburg City Theatre, backed and bullied Bergman through ten productions (including two of Bergman's own plays) on a three-year contract. On film, the independent producer Lorens Marmstedt steered him through four cinematic projects with "wisdom, thoughtfulness and patience. It was he who taught me how to make films."

Bergman's third 'teacher' was the prominent theatre critic Herbert Grevenius, a friend he could consult on a daily basis and an invaluable collaborator and script-doctor. "When I was green and unformed," Bergman recalls in his autobiography, "I learnt my craft from Hammarén, and orderliness of thought from Grevenius: they pinched me, kneaded me, and put me right." They could do little, though, to restore order to Bergman's chaotic private life. Although paying with difficulty for the upkeep to two marriages, he was "careless and extravagant" and trapped in a home that "seethed with crying children, damp washing, weeping women and raging scenes of jealousy, often perfectly justified." It was good script material and was duly transformed into To Joy (made in 1949), but first, to compensate (as he put it) for being a complete mess as a human being, Bergman decided he must at least try to shine as a filmmaker. With Three Strange Loves, brought to him already scripted by Grevenius, he had the opportunity to give a convincing demonstration of sheer professional skill.

The screenplay was based on a controversial collection of short stories, Torst (Thirst) by Birgit Tengroth. Better known as an actress, she began her screen career in 1926 when she was eleven. After five years at the Royal Opera's ballet school, she had been in more than forty productions—notably Dollar (1938) with Ingrid Bergman—by the time she appeared in A Soldier's Reminder (1947), filmed from a Grevenius play. She was the logical choice to play a leading role in her own stories, adding to their disquieting authenticity, and Grevenius adapted them with considerable ingenuity. Thirst became a flashback to Rut's unhappy affair with Raoul, The Faith Healer became Viola's visit to the psychiatrist, and Avant de Mourir was Viola's disastrous evening with the predatory Valborg. The linking narrative, the turbulent train-ride from Basle to Stockholm as endured by Rut and her long-suffering husband Bertil, was derived from Journey with Arethusa, complete with meaningful currency.

According to Greek mythology, the nymph Arethusa—so Bertil tells us—was so passionately pursued by an ardent hunter, Alpheus, that to avoid him she was turned into a spring on the island of Ortygin. Undaunted, Alpheus changed into a river that travelled under the Aegean seabed to be reunited with the waters of the spring. Much enhanced over the years (some versions suggest that Arethusa was fathered by Zeus and became one of the Hesperides, guardians of the Golden Apples ultimately stolen by Hercules), the story takes on an intriguing ambiguity when applied to Rut and Bertil, who identify with the mythical couple but with different interpretations. "The two sexes can never unite," says Bertil. "A sea of tears and misunderstanding lies between them." Rut disagrees, but to judge from the film's final images, haunted by the Syracusan coin, Bergman doesn't.

It is indeed a film about contradictions, each section based on argument and tension. Although the more waspish exchanges could only have come from Bergman (wife to husband: "I hate you so much I want to live just to make your life hell"), the messages in Three Strange Loves are as much visual as verbal. Bergman was intrigued by the potentially seductive glow of a match-flame held close to the face: "this was Birgit Tengroth's idea—I had never done anything like that. To build the plot with almost imperceptible details became a special component in my future filmmaking." Accordingly, his scenes are enriched with contributory extras—a snake on an ant-hill, a clattering mannequin, a crystal carafe signifying (after Rut's abortion) an unquenchable thirst, a cigarette-lighter clicking on and off, a dropped handkerchief, maybe even a hat that vanishes. By drowning his heroines off-screen, the ripples of her departure barely disturbing the tangle of ropes and reflections that evoke her plight, Bergman actually contrives to leave open the likelihood that she'll be rescued and sent (as promised by her psychiatrist) to a mental home.

Outdoors, the sweltering blaze of midsummer seems to be on the attack, anticipating the images at the start of Wild Strawberries and illustrating an unexpected Bergman phobia. "For me," says the director of Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika, "July and August, when the sun shines day after day, are a dreadful torment." On film, the cruel contrast between sunlight and shadow, a stark black-and-white geometry, also seems derived from the menacing decor of the German expressionist melodramas that Bergman greatly admired, particularly apparent here in the grim cut-out ruins glimpsed alongside the train journey.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Three Strange Loves is the new confidence and fluency with which Bergman uses the camera. The sometimes laboured symbolism of earlier films has become subtler: now everything, unobtrusively, has a meaning, even the glimpse of the director himself. The eloquence of the prowling camera, no longer creaking and hesitant as it was in Crisis, reinforces both motion and emotion, accentuating the drama with single takes and drawing the audience into a participation of mood—as with the cunningly angled shot that lifts Viola from her chair on an escape route immediately blocked by Valborg, a deliberate repeat of the moment when she evaded the vampiric Doctor Rosengren by leaping up from his chair. "The film does show," Bergman said in retrospect, "a respectable cinematographic vitality. I was developing my own way of making movies."