You can tell this is a comedy. It's not simply the jazzy version of "Yes, We Have No Bananas" they play at scene changes. It begins with a funeral, and that's a rule: comedies start with funerals, tragedies start with peasants dancing around singing "Oh, We are happy peasants!" -- preferably in Italian. It also looks like Ingmar Bergman was tired of being called a grim symbolic genius, so he included titles noting that various things are not symbolic.
My personal interpretation is that he had one movie left on his contract and was angry with the front office for some reason, so he decided to make a Jerry Lewis movie and in color to boot, because he was tired of dealing with the critics.
Anyway, after the half dozen or so Bergman leading ladies come up and say the same thing over the unseen corpse -- translated as "So like him and so unlike him" -- we drop back five days to witness Carl Bilquist show up as the home of the great cellist to write his stuffy biography and deal with his mistresses -- the Great Man never appears. I think Bergman was fooling everyone and wanted to get back to the theater for a while.
My personal interpretation is that he had one movie left on his contract and was angry with the front office for some reason, so he decided to make a Jerry Lewis movie and in color to boot, because he was tired of dealing with the critics.
Anyway, after the half dozen or so Bergman leading ladies come up and say the same thing over the unseen corpse -- translated as "So like him and so unlike him" -- we drop back five days to witness Carl Bilquist show up as the home of the great cellist to write his stuffy biography and deal with his mistresses -- the Great Man never appears. I think Bergman was fooling everyone and wanted to get back to the theater for a while.