Scener ur ett äktenskap (1974)'s comments

Do you want to let us know what you think? Just login, after which you will be redirected back here and you can leave your comments.

Siskoid

Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage started life as a 6-part TV mini-series on Swedish television, cut down to a still sizable 170-minute film featuring six vignettes in the life of an initially-married couple played by Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson. As a television series, it probably felt less urgent. In the film, what seems like a strong marriage (albeit a pragmatic, friendship-based one), suffers moments of crisis at a faster pace. Whatever the format, Scenes proposes to show complex emotions as actually complex, using characters who express themselves honestly even when they're lying or hiding their meaning. It makes you realize how glib and artificial most relationships are, in fiction. At first, the characters are lying to themselves and other, presenting a cozy front. That front shows more and more cracks and the truth may split them apart. But beyond that is another lie, the lie they tell themselves to justify an ambivalence I suspect stems from mid-life crisis. Maybe they do love each other, but couldn't identify the feeling. This is a most mature presentation of a relationships, with characters who are flawed each in their own way - the wallflower who ties her identity to her role as wife, and the easily humiliated braggart who plays everything as a joke for fear of feeling shame - and both grow out their patheticness by the end, perhaps. Nothing is simple, nothing is easy, everything is up for discussion and dissection, and what comes out of it is a very specific, but oddly real, love story.

4 years 6 months ago