Screening at the New York Film Festival are two documentaries about extraordinary women, both famous and both presented, in different manners, by their children. Nora Ephron is the subject of “Everything Is Copy,” which is directed by her son, Jacob Bernstein, and which charts her progress from the daughter of screenwriters, to cub reporter, to essayist, novelist, screenwriter, and, eventually, film director. “Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words” is partly the self-portrait the title promises but also a picture limned by her children, in their own words. Both Ephron and Bergman lived numerous lives, and the films relate the struggles and pitfalls the women endured while moving from one to another.Nora Ephron, who succumbed to pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia in 2012 at the age of 71, was born and died in New York City. And aside from her childhood, which was spent in Beverly Hills, and a brief detour in Washington, D.C. — along with a few vacations in Paris along the way — she always lived there. The city was in some ways her main topic: Its humor and its frustrations informed whatever the multi-hyphenate, best known for her biting and hilarious essays, created. In “Everything Is Copy,” we learn that the philosophy encapsulated in the title — a phrase passed down from her mother, who would use funny things her children did at home in her screenplays — both helped and hurt her: Ephron’s frankness and humor endeared her to readers but her unsparing critiques often destroyed personal relationships.Ingrid Bergman was kinder to her friends. Her offspring were another matter. It’s not that she was mean. On the contrary, she was often quite nice. She just kept her distance. A series of high-profile relationships produced a long line of children, some of whom she stopped seeing or talking to for long periods. The movie combines archival footage — newsreels, clips, 8mm film shot by Bergman or one of her husbands — with present-day interviews with her children and voice-overs by an actress reading from the letters she wrote to friends over the years. In one of the latter, Bergman remarks, rather coldly, that she would rather be a friend to her children than their mother.The two films attribute much of their subjects’ less attractive behavior to ambition. Both pushed their way to the top. In Ephron’s case, this was less a calculated trajectory then one of reaction: When her marriage broke up, leaving her with two children to support alone, she wrote the novel “Heartburn,” and when that was made into a successful movie, she took the opening into a lucrative field. Bergman was already focused on her career when, as a young beauty, wife, and mother, producer David O. Selznick brought her to Hollywood from Sweden. It has been said that her affair with director Roberto Rossellini — which caused an international scandal — and subsequent marriage were also a bid to change the type of films she was making. She fell in love with Rossellini and his work, and the two remained forever intertwined.Ephron’s and Bergman’s children speak in the films from a distance. The paths their mothers were following began before they were born; they know only a part of the story and are tying to piece together the rest. Some are better off than others: Bernstein is more forgiving; Bergman’s oldest daughter, Pia Lindström, is blunt about the lack of love she felt. One thing on which all agree, however is that both women did great things. Maybe time has softened their view. It is the price of ambition that some get left behind. In these movies, the survivors have the last word.
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