From the Life of the Marionettes
Aus dem Leben der Marionetten
Ingmar Bergman (1980)
In the first part of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) the protagonists Marianne and Johan have dinner with another married couple, Katarina and Peter, whose relationship is evidently dire. These two are the inspiration for Katarina and Peter Egermann, the main characters in From the Life of the Marionettes, who don’t, however, share with the prototypes much more than forenames and an unhappy marriage. As in Scenes from a Marriage, the time is the present yet the actors playing Peter and Katarina in Marionettes are a decade or more younger than Bibi Andersson and Jan Malmsjö, who played their namesakes in the earlier work. The Egermanns have also changed nationality. From the Life of the Marionettes, the last of the three films Bergman made during his self-imposed exile from Sweden during the late 1970s, is set in Munich (where Bergman was living at the time) and peopled by Germans.
In the prologue, Peter (Robert Atzorn) murders a prostitute (Rita Russek) and sodomises her dead body. The rest of the film comprises a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards to the days and hours shortly before and after what the intertitles introducing the various episodes repeatedly call ‘the catastrophe’. In the final sequences, Professor Jensen (Martin Benrath), Peter’s psychiatrist, summarises his patient’s personality and how this led him to murder; Katarina (Christine Buchegger) then listens to a nurse (Ruth Olafs) describe Peter’s daily routine in the mental institution to which he’s been committed. Jensen rattles off the usual suspects: a dominant mother (Lola Müthel) and absent father; Peter’s upbringing, established social rituals (parties, drinking, drugs) and working environment all of which stifled the expression of his true feelings. The ‘emotional blackout’ during which he committed murder was also a moment of self-realisation. Peter’s sex act with the dead prostitute served as a demonstration that ‘You only possess or have control over the person you have killed’. Peter made a half-hearted attempt to end his life before he took another’s and Jensen considers he is now a suicide risk since ‘Only he who kills himself has total control over himself’. The nurse notes Peter’s games of chess against a computer, his cleanliness and obsessively tidy bed-making, his mixture of good manners and reserve, the teddy bear he sleeps with.
Part of what makes the police shrink’s appraisal of Norman Bates at the end of Psycho funny, apart from the wooden reading of the lines, is the chasm between the dull rationality of the summary and the vivid, discombobulating excitement of all that’s gone before. The previous paragraph might seem to suggest that Bergman, like Hitchcock, is having fun with clichés of psychoanalysis but Jensen’s and the nurse’s delivery don’t bear that out – nor is there any tonal contrast between the epilogue and the preceding drama. Both are bleakly straight-faced to the point of humourlessness (and, occasionally, inadvertent comedy). The viewer hasn’t witnessed anything that enables us to see Jensen’s précis as inaccurate or inadequate. Bergman, rather, illustrates Peter’s psyche so clearly that the professional analyses are superfluous.
In other respects, From the Life of the Marionettes has an inattentive feel. The opening sequence and the closing shots of Peter in his cell are in colour; all the intervening film is in black and white. Even though Sven Nykvist’s lighting is ingenious and the monochrome fits with, and reinforces, the glum, exhausted mood, you get the sense that Bergman has chosen it for old times’ sake. Arthur Brenner (Heinz Bennent), the investigator of the ‘catastrophe’, isn’t much more than a narrative device. Having decided to make a drama out of Peter and Katarina’s marital dance of death, Bergman loses interest in them during the excessively long monologue he gives Tim (Walter Schmidinger), Katarina’s partner in a fashion business and (therefore!) homosexual. Although the actor playing him was only in his mid-forties at the time, he looks older and Tim spends a lot of his monologue looking in the mirror and lamenting the ageing process. Bergman clearly takes the view that a queer man is bound to be preoccupied with his appearance; it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the filmmaker, who’d just turned sixty, felt he could hide behind Tim. An openly gay man is an unusual figure in Bergman’s cinema but Tim is a quasi-homophobic conception.
This isn’t the only aspect of the film that makes Bergman look unreconstructed in twenty-first century eyes. It’s possible that the camera’s close attention to the naked body of a woman performing at the peep show where Peter encounters his victim is designed to discomfort viewers by making us aware of our complicity in the ogling. The near-nudity of the prostitute murderee in the prolonged sequence leading up to her death makes you less inclined to give Bergman the benefit of the doubt: she doesn’t have to be wearing so little. You can’t help but compare the physical exposure of these female characters with the discreet, miniaturising distance at which Bergman shoots his two leads when they are naked. This last shot occurs during a visualisation of Peter’s recurring dream, which, as he explains to Jensen, ends with his killing his wife (the name of the prostitute he really does kill is also, of course, Katarina). In terms of aesthetic imagination, this depiction of the couple’s strange sexual symbiosis is the visual highlight of Marionettes, though its marmoreal beauty and Peter’s calm voiceover make it the most emotionally detached dream sequence I’ve seen in a Bergman film.
With the possible exception of Heinz Bennent, who had appeared in Bergman’s previous German film The Serpent’s Egg (as well as in Volker Schlöndorff’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and The Tin Drum), the cast comprises actors better known at the time for their work in theatre rather than on film. It sometimes shows. Christine Buchegger is technically accomplished but, in the scenes illustrating the bilious nightmare of the Egermanns’ marriage, her hard-edged antagonism – a lot of bared teeth and harsh, mocking laughter – comes across as artificial (and annoying: it’s rather unfortunate that you can understand Peter’s compulsion to kill Katarina). Buchegger is better with quieter facial reactions than when she’s spitting out splenetic lines. Much of the time, you feel those come too easily to Bergman; the writing is more interesting when Peter, usually in arguments with Katarina, consciously uses language to ensure that nothing potentially productive gets said, that the vicious circle of their lives remains intact. I wouldn’t have guessed that this was Robert Atzorn’s film debut. His supple face takes the camera naturally and Bergman makes the most of its planes and angles. In the scene in which his character dictates a repetitious, highly technical memo to his secretary (Gaby Dohm), Atzorn’s voice and physical attitude combine brilliantly to convey Peter’s suffocation.
24 February 2018