Scenes from a Marriage

Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann

In certain cases, I have reserved a few works of art to contemplate in my dotage. I just read Proust for the first time and was underwhelmed. He reminded me of Virginia Woolf in his self-absorption. There are always a few Dorothy Dunnett and Tom Sharpe novels that I am saving for my deathbed because I love their prose so. Scenes from a Marriage was in this category partially because I am a recovering Bergmaniac. When the shortened film version was released in the US in 1974, I was deep in the throes of my adoration of the Swedish Ubermensch. I grew up in Baltimore where we were able to receive Washington D. C. stations if we pointed the rabbit eared antenna a certain way. WETA ran a series of Bergman films from the Janus collection with commentary from the young Roger Ebert and I was hooked. I was able to see everything from Summer with Monika through Winter Light as a teen and it helped me glom onto cinema as an art form. Scenes from a Marriage had gotten huzzahs from the American critics, but, being the contrary budding aesthete I was, I vowed to wait and view the real deal.

It was worth the wait. The six part (or scenes), 297 minute 1973 television series has a breadth of vision that eclipses the film version which omits two hours of footage. The length of the series opens up our understanding of Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), the married and then divorced but always a couple the film chronicles. The series was filmed in color by Sven Nykvist, but the baroque expressionism of Cries and Whispers (an alleged masterpiece I find over wrought) has been discarded. Scenes from a Marriage recalls The Rite, also lensed by Nykvist, in that it is a chamber play, almost entirely shot in interiors. What exteriors that exist in the series usually show the characters tearing around the countryside in a Volvo. They are usually there for a reason, though. Bergman repeats a shot of a parked vehicle at the couple's summer cottage to express what has been lost in the passage of time.  The first instance is when Johan is telling Marianne that he is leaving her. The second is when the couple, now divorced and married to unseen others, arrive at the cottage to rekindle their romance. They are able to do so, but only by leaving that cottage and escaping the ghosts of the past.

The majority of the series focuses on interior duologues between Johan and Marianne. These scenes start out in long shot, establishing the perimeter of the field of marital combat, but they always end in tight close-ups. Sometimes of someone in anguish, usually Marianne, but more often with the couple having found a rapprochement, cuddling. There are a lot enormous close-ups, like the one above, of the couple together as a unit, her yin to his yang as it were. Johan is the rational male side, more self centered and sarcastic. Marianne is the masochistic female empath. As has been pointed out, Bergman's sympathies lie with the distaff side even though Josephson's character, as in After the Rehearsal, can be looked at as a Bergman stand-in. However, I detect glimpses of hope within the usual Bergman battle of the sexes. We get plenty of the hell is other people schtick, particularly in the dinner party with Bibi Andersson and Jan Malmsjo, and Ibsen and Strindberg get the usual shout-outs, but the protagonists display personal growth. Johan becomes a little more empathic or "softer" as Marianne puts it and Marianne becomes more independent and sure of herself.

Ms. Ullmann's performance is one of the greatest of the last century, but the care and the skill of the other performers is not far behind. Wench Foss, Norwegian like Ms. Ullmann, is especially memorable as Marianne's mother in a scene snipped from the film version. The scene, in which Marianne blithely tells her mother that she will not be attending her father's interment, is a signpost of Marianne liberating herself from the rituals and unspoken rules of the previous generation. Liberation is not a concept generally found in the claustrophobic world of Herr Bergman, but it is there in Scenes from a Marriage.