Alec B
Your mileage for Bergman's incessant probing of these characters may vary but that's ultimately what makes the ending work so well. Ullmann and Josephson are taken apart and put back together so often that you come to deeply understand their perspectives.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/08/24
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Leaburn O
Whilst I may never have been a huge Bergman fan (Wild Strawberries aside), this really was a painful watch. I never felt any sympathy for either party and just couldn't invest in the story. An examination of the human condition and how it impacts relationships could be an interesting theme but it never captivated. We're just left with angst of two adults unable to hold their bleep together. And it goes on and on and on and…. This completes a list I had of the top 250 films ever, and sadly I ended on a real stinker. Bought this one in DVD as couldn't find on UK tv or streaming. It sits with my other Bergman films in the collection that are unlikely ever to be watched again.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
08/23/23
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Alexsander F
Filme com uma boa proposta, numa pegada dos filmes do Antonioni, com muito diálogo e tudo caminhando de forma bem lenta.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
07/03/23
Full Review
dave s
Scenes from a Marriage has none of the visual wonders one would expect from a film directed by Ingmar Bergman and shot by Sven Nykvist. Despite this apparent shortcoming, it is a riveting account of the disintegration of the marriage of an affluent Swedish couple, Marianne (Liv Ullman) and Johan (Erland Josephson). Acknowledging the sobering reality that their love has faded over the period of their relationship, they engage in a series of insightful, searing and sometimes incendiary dialogues as they come to terms with sobering realizations regarding their marriage. Despite its considerable length and preponderance of talking heads, the film is wildly entertaining due to the depth of the characters, the intelligence of the dialogue, and the spectacular performances from Josephson and Ullman, both of whom express as much with their mannerisms as they do with their voices.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
03/30/23
Full Review
william d
No one is more surprised than I am that I actually enjoyed a three hour movie of a married couple just talking. I think it stems from the fact that these characters are not static, they evolve over the course of time, and it was fascinating to see what direction they would take. That is a testament to Bergman's excellent script and the fine performances by Erland Josephson and particularly Liv Ullman.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Mild spoilers from third paragraph onwards
Johan and Marianne lead a life of security, order, contentment, and loyalty, the four factors that constitute a happy married life as per Marianne. The one seminal factor that's missing is love, which they seem to regard as dispensable in their case. What they don't realize is that in their attempts to hinder their hearts from deciding their way once in their life they would inevitably end up giving in to their emotions that have been pent up for years by a systematic yet flimsy veil of spurious perfection. At a dinner party, their friends Peter and Katarina quarrel about setting restrictions on each other and emotional and material ties. It creates ripples on Marianne's part, and subsequently, her relationship with Johan. She grows more vulnerable and finds herself bewildered and perplexed amidst a decision that seems to have never been used to be, important as it is, of that decisive significance to her. Later, Johan tells Marianne he's fallen in love with another woman and are leaving to Paris for eight months at least. Consequently, their clinically cold bed that was only heated up by tirades has become a festering one of infidelity.
"Marianne: Sometimes I long to simply float along, and maybe even sink.
Johan: Who doesn't?
Marianne: You. You don't.
Johan: What would you know about that?
Marianne: I know you pretty well by now. You're too well-adjusted. You like things to be tidy.
Johan: So do you.
Marianne: Do I?
Johan: You're a perfectionist.
Marianne: Really?
Johan: You detest disorder in mind and body."
Marianne and Johan's marriage wasn't out of love, but rather because both of them were unhappy after both are divorced from previous spouses. Thus, it's shaped by practical terms not emotional ones. Every idea and decision must be meticulously thought out, even if it's one of pleasure. As Marianne once said, [their] vacations are even more tightly scheduled. There's basically no room for consulting one's heart. The mere concept of being "romantic" is distasteful to Marianne, something that she's apparently implicitly dictated. They seem to view it as something that's liable to stain their relationship regardless of the myriad of connotative meanings this term has. However, they both possess a romantic notion and lack it all at once, and all for the worst. The fact they view themselves as well as their relationship as one of idealism based on the "happy life" they lead is romantic to a fault. That's especially apparent one Johan talks about himself and how a perfect husband, father and son he is. Whilst Marianne is actually quite the opposite (she can't even find a word to describe herself with), she's the one who dismisses the term "romantic" her interviewer labelled the life Marianne seeks according to her talking about ideals on the top of which is fidelity. It was there friends' quarrel that triggered the sensitive sore in Marianne and Johan's souls, respectively. Alas, and in the words of Johan himself later on, they're "emotional illiterates."
The idea of loneliness looms large over Johan's head. If the fact he's used to Marianne is what keeps him ensnared in that toxic relationship, then its his fear of loneliness is his impetus for getting back to such draining cycle. He'd rather raise a toast to loneliness with Marianne than drinking alone. Johan sees that one should embrace the fact loneliness is absolute. It's predominant, only interspersed with some illusions of a sense of togetherness that would eventually fade after a while. By being cognizant of that fact, one would never gets tricked into believing loneliness isn't the norm, and would lead a secure life. This quote seems uttered by none other than a classic Johan. Nevertheless, when Marianne tells him she wishes she was as assure and certain as him, he admittingly dismisses her description of him, saying: "it's all talk." By doing so, Johan divulges the change that's taken over him after his affair with Paula. It seems that such relationship changed how he views life as he said. He became a different person: a frail and depressed one.
"Marianne: I'm not so certain.
Johan: Of what?
Marianne: I'm not certain I know who I am."
To Marianne, however, loneliness, technically, has never exists yet has always plagued her in the sense she only finds her identity when lying with Johan, sharing the same thorny bed. As she said herself, she's become a masochist of sorts, and her sole consolation all her married life until she became the masochist she is has been the tentative sense of settlement shaped by their false notion of happiness. What further bolsters these views upon Johan and Marianne is the fact they've never achieved a luscious intimacy. The ephemeral flame ignited after meeting one another following a long separation is soon quenched with a lukewarm affection followed by a severe altercation. As we see in the fourth episode as Marianne reads aloud a journal entry and Bergman uses photos from her childhood and her adolescence in montage. Her mother made sure she and her sisters would be agreeable so she punished them anytime they broke the conventions she set for them. Marianne was ugly and awkward and was reminded of that. Her thoughts revolved around nothing but sex. She enjoyed her secretive inner persona which was her only refuge from her mother, and decided to behave in a sycophantic manner from then in on order to impress men so much so she ultimately lost her identity; she no longer knew who she was. She obliviously lost herself in the process of being liberated from her suppressive family ties. That explains a lot about her being a malleable woman in the hands of her husband, as well as being entrapped in that 'perfect' systematic relationship.
Shot on 16mm and featuring grainy images à la cinéma vérité style, Sven Nykvist here homes in on the faces of Johan and Marianne, observing their features as they weather, and wither with, age. The subtle, pithy facial expressions of Ullman, in particular, are the series' primary subject. Whenever a bitter truth is revealed to Marianne or a layer is peeled off from the façade of her ostensibly ideal marriage, Nykvist's camera relentlessly pans rapidly to zoom-in on Ullman's face, ending in a long-take close-up that unabashedly lingers on her appalled, mortified countenance. That's notable in episode two where a woman, Mrs. Jacobi, comes to see Marianne in order to file for divorce from her husband after 20 years together because their marriage is devoid of love. As much as I found it a bit on-the-nose that this woman mirrors Marianne's marital state, the execution of that scene left me stunned by its sheer brilliance. Marianne sees herself in that woman after yet another 10 years of loveless marriage, causing her emotions to dilapidate. Her words pierce Marianne's bound yet lonely soul and echo deep inside of her until they reach the arid bottom. And with a sharp, quick cut ending with a zoom-in on Marianne's face, we see her shocked at the cankering loveless marriage with its potential of numbing her senses.
Scenes from a Marriage offers a pessimistic view on relationships and life in general, and the more you dig deeper into its core, the more its dark themes manifest themselves. Neither the grainy texture that permits light to permeate it and lend it a pseudo-nostalgic sense nor the ending credits that are read over a beautiful landscape of Fårö seems to hardly mitigate the bitterness of the relationship of Johan and Marianne. Rather, they serve as a perfunctory artifice that cynically reflects the self-seriousness and bourgeois-esque mannerisms the couple used to adopt as well as a painfully effective contrast that grows more and more acrid as the characters mature, seemingly fulfilling their whims and filling their voids only to face the fact they'll never find comfort. The lack of love their relationship terminally suffers from from the get-go and the societal norms their marriage is bound to are revealed to be more of forces that shoveled their marriage into a fragile comfort zone of fabricated perfection than integral accumulative causes of their ever-aggravating breach. It's not that their loveless marriage should be acquitted of their dysfunctional relationship, but their upbringing is the real culprit that magnified each one's human flaws tenfold, which led them to summon their inner demons once they bear their overburdened, tormented yet grudge-bearing souls. To nitpick about something, I think its intentional straightforwardness rather betrayed how the story winds up, but I'll happily let that slide to make Bergman break my 4-month 5 stars drought.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/07/23
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