Swedendrama1973 color 171 min.
Director: Ingmar Bergman
CLV: $69.95 - available
           2 discs, catalog # CC1445L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema

Anyone who has not yet seen this extraordinary journey into the soul of a relationship will be stunned by its intimacy. Those collectors who do recall watching Scenes from a Marriage either in the movie theater or on television in 1973 will also be startled because Bergman's masterpiece remains as fresh as it was at the time. When first broadcast in Scandinavia in six weekly episodes, Scenes from a Marriage kept everybody glued to their sets. Cops deserted their duty in Denmark, leaving the traffic to look after itself; Bergman was besieged with calls from couples considering divorce. In numbers of spectators, this landmark achievement can be accounted Bergman's most popular picture, even though he shot it in 16mm on a tiny budget (around $250,000 in today's money).

Few directors know so much as Bergman about the throes of divorce. He made the break with four wives, and had seriour relationships with actresses like Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Liv Ullmann without actually marrying. These autobiographical experiences invest the arguments and reconciliations in Scenes from a Marriage with an authenticity that transcends their theatrical context.

There are no contemporary cultural refrences to clog dialogue, as there are in, for instance, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, shot just three years later and much influenced by Bergman. Nor do the conversations soar into those metaphysical realms that many people find irritating in Bergman; the dialogue is sheet-anchored in reality.

Scenes from a Marriage depends for its impact on that dialogue--but what dialogue! The screenwriting in the first episode alone serves as an object lesson in how to construct and balance a sequence, each line tightening the spiral of tension, each cut like the kiss of a naked blade.

Not that film suffers either gloom or self-pity. Bergman is quick to satirize the ideal bourgeois couple, as the film opens with Johan and Marianne being photographed and interviewed for a popular magazine. Johan (Erland Josephson) fairly bursts with smugness while he describes himself as intelligent and understanding Marianne is less complacent, but like her husband comes from a comfortable background. She is the daughter of a lawyer, and has entered the profession herself, specializing, with exquisite irony, in divorce matters, while Johan, son of a doctor, has become a research scientist.

As the couple listen in embarrassment to a violent argument between their best friends, Peter and Katarian, over an immaculately-arranged bourgeois dinner, their own relationship seems unquestioned. But the quarrel sows a psychological doubt in their minds about the security of marriage.

When Johan drives out to their summer house one evening and unexpectedly declares that he's in love with a girl half his age, the illusion of happiness pops like a balloon. Soon they pluck up courage to start quarrelling, while yet maintaining the courtesies of a joint existance--Marianne insists on checking if Johan has sufficient clothes for his trip with a mistress she has never met, and of course Johan for his part has anticipated the financial angle and made provision for monthly transfers of funds to keep the family in the manner to which they are accustomed.

As the years pass, this all-too-typical pair arrive at a kind of understanding. They drift apart, remarry other partners, but always feel an undertow of affection and complicity towards each other. As Johan relinquishes the ideals of his youth, and slips into a mood of moral defeat, so Marianne appears to prosper, to grow in authority and self-esteem. She is indeed the stronger, like so many of Bergman's women. Johan falls victim to those two cardinal sins in the Bergman universe, indifference and mediocrity.

Scenes from a Marriage cannot be dismissed as a mere play for television. Bergman constantly introduces devices and solutions that belong unmistakebly to the cinema. For instance, after learning of her husband's mistress, Marianne goes into the one dark room in the house, the kitchen, and only there, in a kind of privacy, does she give way to sobbing.

Bergman is renowned for his close-ups, and they dominate every scene in this film. But close-ups demand great acting, and neither Erland Josephson nor Liv Ullmann has ever excelled the persuasuveness of their performances here. Take, for example, the shots of Johan as he sits munching some sandwiches just before he confesses his affair to Marianne, fussing around him, knows instinctively that something is amiss, but cannot yet identify it.

A word, too, for Bibi Andersson's compelling cameo as the wounded Katarina, keeping the ash on her cigarette elegantly intact as she responds in kind to her husband's jibes.

Sweden's greatest playwright, August Strindberg, is the film's spiritual godfather. In dramas like The Father and The Dance of Death, Srindberg flays alive the concept of marriage, showing her husband and wife locked in a war of attrition that has no victor. Despite--or perhaps by virtue of-his reverence for Strindberg, Bergman never adapted any of the playwright's works for the screen.

Viewers of this magnificent disc may decide that he has done the next best thing, and created a Strindberg masterpiece of his own.
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