I’m about to sit down with a screener of Dheeraj Akolkar‘s Liv and Ingmar: Painfully Connected, which was first seen 13 months ago at the 2012 New York Film Festival. The doc is set to open on 12.13 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe on 65th Street in Manhattan and in Los Angeles at Landmark’s Nuart. I have to say that the gentle piano music on the trailer soundtrack has me worried. Akolkar “directed” and “wrote” but the film is obviously Liv Ullmann‘s recollection of her long relationship with Bergman and not, say, some impartial God’s-eye view. A woman’s film, in short, about one of the most worshipped filmmakers of the 20th Century who…oh, yes, that’s right, was quite depressed and gloomy and neurotic for much of his life. And he liked the ladies.

I keep thinking back to that sentence in the introduction to The Film Snob’s Dictionary, which is that to a later-day film snob “watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and-Chardonnay.”