Some are more mortal than others. Ingmar Bergman's new film, The Touch, the best about love he has ever made, is a record of a man who brings into the existence of a calmly married couple his own feeling that death is something that has to be ambushed daily. The couple, Swedish, a doctor and a housewife, are played by Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson. Their names are Andreas and Karin, and their life is fine. The invader, whom they are each and differently devoted to, is a German-American Jew called David, played by Elliott Gould. He lives as if he were running onto the end of a blade. Who would think that Elliott Gould, whose American pictures have cast him as a gusty hell-raiser, could have the great technique and responsiveness to tip the balance for an alien director who sensed that he could play a figure of ancient trouble? The Swedes speak English to him and Swedish between themselves. The practical solution is aesthetically perfect. The hesitancies and the intimacies are precise: one closed world, known and fluent; one not mapped, and dangerous.

David's self-hatred bites his bones. This isn't the Elliott Gould we know. He even looks different in Bergman's picture, which was photographed by Sven Nykvist. The lowering, poetic head, often seen in close-up, has huge power and gentleness. The character loathes himself very confusingly for anyone fond of him. Sometimes the touch of his affair with Karin soothes him, but sometimes it drives him into a fury because he so powerfully dreads the loss of it. The dread practically makes him precipitate the loss, like a man so horrified by his own mortality that he kills himself. The two others live their lives as if everything were going to last forever; his behaviour is a trap for anticipated death, laid in a rage, with him shivering behind the hedge. What is he bringing into the world of these two happy blond neutralists, this rancorous man? Elliott Gould's acting has always had an edge of danger, and Bergman uses it wonderfully.

Karin's mother has just died. At the beginning of the film, Karin is racing to the hospital too late. No crying in the room. A nurse brings her the wedding ring. She escapes then into the dark somewhere and hides to weep. David looms into her sanctuary and puts on the lights. "Can I do something for you?" "Turn the lights down, please. Please leave me alone."

A while later, when Andreas has treated David for what is said to be some kidney trouble, David is spending an evening with the two of them. Alone with her for a few moments, he blurts out that he is in love with her. She pays no heed, it seems. Turn the lights down, please. Please leave me alone. We're happy, her silence yells. David persists in talking out loud. He first saw her when she was crying at the hospital, he says. Her face blocks him. Perhaps she remembers him, perhaps not. "You were sitting in the cloakroom crying. I fell in love with you," he says. The affair they have later shuttles between the same extremes of concern and clamor, and always seems rooted in that moment at the hospital when Karin was unlike herself and didn't want to be seen, and when David was stirred and caught up by the sight of a fellow-sufferer. Most of his family were killed by the Nazis. He was brought up in America. Now he is an archaeologist, digging up a past that he can't leave alone. You can watch his mind sometimes wrecking the present for him by going over and over old soil. The film uncurls slowly, in time with what Karin takes in. One learns only much later that he was treated by Andreas not for kidney stones but for putting his head in a gas oven, and that he has a lethally attached sister in London who has known about Karin all the time when Karin has never heard of her.

After the first dinner, when the insurgent has left, Andreas and Karin go to bed. The intimacy between them seems exact. They are without suspicion, joking and muttering, like erotic twins. The peculiar chaos of David's presence that evening can be ignored. Andreas, an intelligent, watchful man with the outward style of someone boring, was showing home-movie slides: Karin and the children, and some studies of orchids. The orchids drove David mad. "Haven't you a picture of your wife nude?" he said, off the top of his head. The couple now forget that, for the moment.

Bibi Andersson has never before given such a performance. In the scenes between Karin and Andreas, everything is long-established and light. The attachment is feathery. No peril exists. When she goes to David's flat and begins to fall in love with him, she behaves with the same instant trust but also borrows some of his raw impulse. On the first day, he loses his nerve and can't stop talking bashfully about the weather and her clothes, which she has already changed ten times with a self-mocking and sad chagrin over what she looks like; she is the one who gets them to bed. Her legs are rather too short and her bottom is too big, she says, gabbling the most touching breakneck inventory of herself. "Shut up!" he seems to be yelling at her. "I'm a monster, don't you realize? I can't manage you if you're going to be nice." It takes him months to deal with the pure, sweet key of her feeling for him. Meanwhile, for the first time in her life, she takes on the onus of duplicity. Hard. Bergman cuts backward and forward between the couple's pretty, cultivated house and David's flat, which is near some building site with screaming buzz saws. Moments of the affair seem benedictive. The two of them live on bits and pieces of time, and he flies into rages about the bourgeois domesticity that he accuses of robbing him. For a while, she pulls him out of the mud. She hasn't an idea, this flaxen wife, of what she has taken on, and perhaps the very fact that she doesn't know it is what transforms him. He looks at her with amazing softness, unseen by her, while she reads a poem to him in Swedish, laughing at herself a bit, and then tries to translate it. What's the word? To do with fireplace. Something they had long ago. "Hearth," he says. The paradox is that she and Andreas probably have five hearths, and that it is David, the antiquarian, who is dragging her into the world of buzz saws. The film is partly about a man introducing someone he adores to the very sophistication about mortality and extinction that he loves her for not having.

The Touch is also about compacts. David gets furious with Andreas for ever mentioning again that he tried to kill himself. We agreed not to, he says, to get out of the impossibility that he is in the middle of being confronted with an Andreas talking about the major compact between himself and Karin. The most powerful of David's agreements, moving and deathly, turns out to be with the congenitally ill sister in London. Her blood runs in him in every way. "We are inseparable," she says to Karin in London at the end of the film, smoking endlessly, looking scared, clumping around in heavy shoes and an embroidered cardigan to offer a drink in a flat that she and David are in the midst of moving from. The attachment between brother and sister is the adhesion of flesh to a live electric wire. In hindsight, her possessiveness and fright have been there in David's bad moments with Karin all through the film.

Like Persona and The Passion of Anna, the two other masterpieces of this great time in Bergman's life, The Touch has the most subtle and complicated interest in the idea that intimates' identities pour in and out of one another. Karin sometimes wondrously manages to empty David of too much past. With Andreas, she is the vessel of their solid married life; she sees her husband changing, but she thinks it is a matter of her own changed way of looking at him—changed by secretiveness about being on the telephone, or by fear of suddenly looking incomprehensibly happy. She doesn't know that he is trying desperately not to be flooded with the blackness of David's spirit. Long before she does, we pick up that he understands what's happening. There is something unmistakable about the longing and silence of the way he hangs on to her one night when they are on their way to bed, with him looking at her achingly in the mirror while she looks at him in it and avoids noticing his expression. The Touch is a picture floodlit from within, sometimes halcyon, always transparently fond of its characters—people with three quite different styles of grownupness. David combats life, living on some adrenalin of grievance, rooting up old anguish in the middle of the present. How to contain the indwelling historian, how not to tot up accounts. Andreas is a classical man whose only inflexible rage is directed against the Romantic view of suffering. He is, after all, a doctor. Karin was used to being able to manage; a love without equanimity throws her off balance. Bergman's screenplay for his people is simple and expressive. Karin's hesitations in speaking English are part of the eloquence of it: "I've lost my, whatever it is, footing," she says. Her insights into what she and this difficult man could do for each other are the same as his, but they have them at different times. "Please, let me go now," she says to David when he has grabbed her out of a shop, onto the street, and she says it obviously hoping that he never will, but his hands at once fly away from cupping her face, because he is on trust to himself to pretend that it's easy. His pledges and pleas come too late, when he has returned months after leaving Sweden without a word. She had fled to his flat and found it abandoned, with her letters stacked in the only drawer that had anything in it. The film is full of acting moments that are physically miraculous, like brilliant fish drawn up on a line, like the memories of everyone. In this scene in the empty fiat, she simply walks up and down very fast, as people do when they are in pain. And then she stands near a wall and props herself against it with her forehead. I once saw a great race horse do that when it was about to die, as though it only had a headache.