A Season in Hell
By T.E. Kalem
SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
Screenplay and Direction by INGMAR BERGMAN
All wars are cruel, but civil wars are the cruelest. A marriage in which love has turned to hate becomes a civil war. In this film, it is Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman's basic contention that something in the institution of marriage curdles love and ferments hate. It is possible to deny the premise, but the picture defies refutation. This is a work of magnetic force, searing intelligence and an oppressive melancholy lightened by flashes of erotic ecstasy.
But early on, one must seriously question if Scenes from a Marriage is in truth a film. In content, it is a child of the stage, most obviously Strindberg's Dance of Death, Ibsen's A Doll's House and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? More unsettlingly, its form has been imposed by the demands of TV. Bergman wrote and filmed it as six 50-minute segments for Scandinavian television. Telescoping the series in length to just under three hours blurs some of the narrative line, and Bergman's unrelenting reliance on talking heads will give some filmgoers visual and auditory claustrophobia.
Marriage begins airily enough. Wedded for ten years, Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann) have been selected by some national publication as a kind of "ideal couple" for a feature story on successful marriages. The superficially earnest lady interviewer asks the usual questions, some of them posed as answers. Johan is 42 and a behavioral scientist. Marianne is 32 and a divorce lawyer. They have a lovely home, two lovely daughters, lovely meshing temperaments. Fill in all the blanks with lovely.
Celebrating at a dinner party with another ideal couple, their friends Katerina (Bibi Andersson) and Peter (Jan Malmsjo), Johan and Marianne have to face something rather unlovely. Beginning with taunting asides and barbed revelations (sexual and otherwise), Katerina and Peter erupt into one of those verbal cockfights designed to draw the other spouse's blood in front of mixed company. Johan and Marianne are embarrassed to silence, but what has really been stilled and wounded is their purring complacency in their own bliss.
Old Magic. Soon after, they begin to pick flaws in each other, to break out into raspy little headachy tiffs. Yet everything seems contained. The we-ness of the marriage web is tenacious even when its strands are mundane realities like dental appointments, plumbing repairs and dinner every Sunday with the in-laws. Then one day Johan tells Marianne that he has fallen in love with a young student in his university seminar and is leaving to be with her. All the blood seems to drain out of Marianne's body. Ullmann even manages to make her lambent sapphire-blue eyes turn pale. In the Mediterranean she might have howled. In Scandinavia, even emotional desolation is sculpted in ice.
Divorce time comes like a fifth season in hell. Fury is king. In one scene, Johan slaps and pummels Marianne till her nose sluices blood. Yet their fiercest encounters act as unconscious aphrodisiacs leading to sudden fervid couplings. Several years pass. Johan gets married again, but not to the student. So does Marianne. They meet. The old libidinous magic still works. They head for a clandestine weekend in a country cottage, free at last, or so Bergman would have us believe, to breathe the oxygen of joy that marriage to each other had throttled.
An hourglass motif is visible in the Johan-Marianne relationship. The sands of power, all his at the film's beginning, are all hers at the end. Women's libbers will probably applaud, but Bergman is less concerned with the inequality of the sexes than with the inequity of the cosmos. He seems to see the love of men and women as a metaphysical surrogate for the absence of God and God's love. It is clearly an incommensurable task. But who could better symbolize the desperate gallantry of the venture than Liv Ullmann, the orchid of the snows? >T.E. Kalem
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