We all fictionalise our lives, our genesis points, for the most part in banal and unconscious ways, perhaps at worst, we don't think about such things at all, and treat it all as a mix of natural order, and nothing of consequence at all. It probably takes the supreme ego of an artist like Ingmar Bergman to take to task his own genesis point and create a novel out of it - or is it an expanded screenplay? I've tried looking it up and not figured out whether the film is an adaptation or the novel a fleshed out script. I guess, given the man, the latter...

I accidentally read the second in the trilogy first, not knowing it was a trilogy, as it was at the library and was intrigued. I then ordered the first and third in the trilogy, but failed to read them before they had to be returned, so bought copies... and finally the sun is out, meaning I can read in two afternoons what takes a month or more in winter.

This seems, by virtue of being Bergman's prologue to his own life, far less personal than Sunday's Children. Sunday's Children seemed like a Rosetta Stone to his films, meanwhile The Best Intentions - probably three times the length or so - is far more by-the-numbers, and not particularly a revelation or exceptional. Certainly, you get a heavy dose of what in Berman's life became Fanny & Alexander, but I don't think anyone would be particularly blown away by this as, you know, an exceptional artist's work.

It was very much enjoyable, however.

I do think there was something quite cheeky about Bergman doling these three works out to others to film. Could you make an exceptional 'Bergman film' (whatever that is, they are so varied) out of The Best Intentions? Or Sunday's Children (I've yet to read Private Confessions)? I am not convinced these are screenplays that would have matched where Bergman had left his body of work, with Fanny & Alexander.