Scenes from a Marriage
Scener ur ett äktenskap
Ingmar Bergman (1973)
The six scenes take place over a period of ten years, during which time the marriage ends. In Scenes from a Marriage’s original format, each scene comprised one episode of a television series, broadcast in Sweden in April and May 1973. This condensed version, with the series’ total running time reduced from 282 to 168 minutes, was subsequently released in cinemas. Ingmar Bergman’s first work for television was The Rite (1969) but Scenes was his first TV miniseries (as they weren’t called in those days?), to be followed in 1976 by Face to Face. There may be fewer extraordinary images here than in an average Bergman work conceived for cinema but there are some; the very fact that Sven Nykvist is the cameraman is evidence enough that Bergman didn’t regard making television drama as slumming it. The influence of Scenes from a Marriage has continued to be seen in similarly-themed cinema films over the years, from Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992) to Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019).
The start of Baumbach’s film is surely indebted to the start of Bergman’s. In Marriage Story, the husband and wife list what they like most about each other; the lists are then revealed to be an exercise, set for the couple as part of the marriage mediation they’re engaged in, and about to pull the plug on. It’s an ingenious device: Baumbach accompanies the voiceovers with shots of the pair happy together and with their young son. This visual evidence of high points in the marriage increases the audience’s shock at learning that it’s over – and interest in finding out what went wrong. In fact, Baumbach improves on Bergman’s introduction, which sees Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) being interviewed and photographed for a magazine article on love and marriage. This works well as a means of immediately drawing the viewer in and conveying important parts of the couple’s personalities. Asked to sum up who they are, Johan, who’s forty-two, supplies a glowing self-assessment (his humorous delivery of it doesn’t mean he doesn’t mean what he says); Marianne, seven years younger than her husband, is modest and diffident, except in endorsing his excellent qualities. But the evident unease underlying the smiling harmony the pair presents to their interviewer (Anita Wall) and photographer (Bergman, heard but not seen) announces too clearly that the marriage will soon be in trouble.
What follows makes you disbelieve that Marianne and Johan would really have given this interview (and realism is a more important factor here than it is in most Bergmans). In the next episode, with their dinner party guests Katarina (Bibi Andersson) and Peter (Jan Malmsjö), the hosts laugh with some embarrassment about the published article. Johan and Marianne had recently, on the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary, renewed their marriage contract (whatever that may mean in Sweden) but it’s not clear what would appeal to this well-off professional couple – he’s a psychology professor, she’s a divorce lawyer – about becoming public property via the pages of a seemingly populist magazine. After dinner, the conversation soon turns to the state of, and reveals grisly ruptures in, the marriage of Katarina and Peter, whose splenetic exchanges bring to mind the memorable mutual loathing of the husband and wife to whom Professor Borg gives a lift in Wild Strawberries (1957). The opening section of Husbands and Wives, in which one supposedly happily married couple stuns another by announcing their separation, corresponds to this horribly gripping sequence in Scenes from a Marriage but the tone is very different. Besides, the prospective divorcees in Husbands and Wives eventually get back together (while the other marriage founders); Katarina and Peter, who supposedly inspired their namesakes in Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes (1980), are well past the point of no return.
Although her friends therefore turn to Marianne for practical professional advice rather than a sympathetic ear, she provides both to another client, Mrs Jacobi (Barbro Hiort af Ornäs), in the next, two-part sequence, which shows Marianne and Johan doing their respective jobs, with Bergman repeatedly cross-cutting between them. Marianne’s penetrating conversation with Mrs Jacobi may well be the source of the first, extended meeting between the wife and her lawyer in Marriage Story but in Bergman’s scenario the lawyer is a wife too, and unnerved by things that her client says. At the university, Johan shows off his latest research to a female colleague, Eva (Gunnel Lindblom). He also lets her see poetry that he’s written but which, as he admits in response to Eva’s question, he hasn’t shown Marianne, who’s not into poetry. Even before this my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me moment there’s flirtation in the laboratory air. It’s dissolved when Eva offends Johan by pronouncing his poetry mediocre but it still serves to prepare the way for his bombshell in the film’s third main section.
By this stage, we know that – as they mention even to the magazine journalist – Marianne and Johan were initially drawn to one another by shared unhappiness rather than love at first sight. We’ve learned subsequently that their sex life isn’t great but that they’re in the habit of talking to each other about their feelings and the tensions between them in a grown-up and, they like to think, therapeutic way. To Marianne’s delight, Johan returns unexpectedly early from a conference. She prepares them food; he announces he’s been having an affair with Paula, a younger woman whom he met at a previous conference. He’ll be leaving for Paris next day and staying there with Paula for several months while he undertakes a pre-arranged academic project. Liv Ullmann powerfully expresses Marianne’s shock and mounting distress at a succession of revelations that culminates in her discovery, in a desperate phone call shortly after Johan has driven away, that friends of theirs (not Katarina and Peter!) already knew about the affair.
This sequence is certainly a dramatic highlight but it’s pivotal not only in plot terms but also in the sense that, from this point onwards, Johan and Marianne are the only people that we see. Bergman has written some splendid dialogue for his fine leads but there’s still the best part of two hours to go. What follows, although compelling to watch and listen to, can’t escape the intrinsic difficulty of a largely static two-hander about a close, fraught relationship: in order to maintain momentum, the balance of power between the pair has to keep shifting and they have to keep lurching between bursts of rancour and reconciliation. You end up admiring the stamina and invention of the actors rather than believing much of what they’re asked to do and say.
The breakdown of the marriage also raises doubts about the breadth of Bergman’s vision of it. At the start of the opening sequence, Johan and Marianne are photographed with their two daughters (Rossana Mariano and Lena Bergman). The children are then dispatched so that the interview with their parents can begin, and this foreshadows Bergman’s treatment of them. It’s understandable that he didn’t want the two girls complicating the showdowns between Marianne and Johan but the latter, as far as we can see, abandons the children without a word to them, let alone compunction. In the later parts of the film, they’re mentioned chiefly as a financial burden – so there’s not much sense even of what kind of mother Marianne is to them. She feels betrayed by her husband but not, it seems, because he’s also let their children down: presenting Marianne and Johan solely as marriage partners and not as parents, as Bergman does, strains credibility. And when Johan tells Marianne that he’s wanted to leave her for the last four years, it’s even harder to credit that magazine interview a year or so ago.
When he made Scenes from a Marriage Bergman had recently embarked on his fifth, last and most enduring marriage (to Ingrid von Rosen), following a five-year relationship with Liv Ullmann. (He had also fathered nine children.) The relevance of personal history to the drama is difficult to overlook in the fourth scene, when Johan visits Marianne and, as she talks about what she’s learning about herself in psychotherapy, a montage of images of the younger Marianne shows photographs of Liv Ullmann as a child, a teenager and a young woman. That said, the specifics of Johan and Marianne’s conflict may not owe that much to the Bergman-Ullmann relationship which, after all, wasn’t technically a marriage – on which Bergman seems to want to comment as an institution. An autobiographical element is perhaps more present in the characterisation of Johan as the wrongdoer. His Wikipedia entry quotes Bergman as justifying his numerous affairs ‘to his various wives by telling them: “I have so many lives …”’ but his cinema is more critical of male marital infidelity or cruelty to women, in films as tonally different as To Joy (1950), A Lesson in Love (1954) and Winter Light (1963).
Bergman makes Johan’s behaviour contemptible – not just through his liaison with Paula but in smaller details, too: at the end of Marianne’s monologue reviewing her past and what therapy is teaching her, she looks to her husband for a reaction and he has fallen asleep. Paula is never seen, which virtually rules out showing what she means to Johan. In the fifth scene, a violently acrimonious meeting with Marianne to sign off their divorce papers, Johan feebly admits he has tired of his affair with Paula. Erland Josephson is admirably resourceful but the writing of his character, compared with that of Marianne, creates an imbalance that limits the drama throughout. Marianne is altogether more complex. Her desperately needy, what-I-have-done-wrong reaction to the news of his affair with Paula makes Johan all the angrier. We’ve already got a sense of Marianne’s passive-aggressive tendencies and of the erosive effect they may have had in the course of a decade of marriage. Her therapy leads her to question whether what she had thought of as native unselfishness is, rather, a form of cowardice.
It can be argued that Ingmar Bergman treated the women in his films better than the women in his life and found censuring the screen men who did them wrong an easier matter than self-criticism. What’s striking, on nearly the fiftieth anniversary of the original television broadcast of Scenes from a Marriage, is how easily the gender bias in his work – the work of a man whose personal life can be seen as an egregious case of male entitlement – now plays to audience expectations of men behaving badly: in 2022, it’s taken as read that the husband will be the villain of the piece. How much has changed since 1973 is evident in the contemporary Sight and Sound review by the Swedish writer, critic and film-maker Stig Björkman used as the BFI handout for this screening in their Liv Ullmann retrospective. Marianne and Johan, as they prepare to finalise their divorce, wrote Björkman, ‘quarrel and start to fight’. This now seems a startling description of a physically unequal struggle, in which the man beats up the woman.
The piece feels eventually like an indictment of marriage, not just because of the escalating disharmony between husband and wife but also because, once divorced, they get on better than we’ve ever seen them get on, except in that transparently concealing performance for the magazine interview. Several years on from the divorce and married to new partners who are currently away, Marianne and Johan take the opportunity to go on a secret weekend together. They end up in the country cottage of Johan’s friend (he has the same name – Fredrik – as the supposedly mutual friend who told Marianne back in the third scene that he and his wife already knew about Johan’s affair with Paula), and sleep together. Marianne has a terrible nightmare from which she struggles to emerge. As she frets that she has never loved or been loved, Johan holds and comforts her, assuring Marianne that the two of them love each other, however imperfectly. Each of the six scenes has a title; this one is ‘In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World’. That setting immediately brought to mind Saraband (2003), which reunites the elderly Marianne and Johan, leaving me eager to revisit what was Bergman’s final film.
10 April 2022