Scenes From a Marriage

Because all of film auteur Ingmar Bergman’s movies throw you full force into the middle of somebody else’s convoluted lives, there’s no other way to familiarize yourself with them but to buckle your seatbelt and push “play.” Berman is obsessed with the existentialist themes of fate, bad faith, nothingness, authenticity, action, transcendence and the like. Somehow, I didn’t discover Bergman while I was in college obsessing over the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have had to of read Being and Nothingness twice before I figured out what the hell Sartre was talking about. (Being and Nothingness is, according to me, the greatest treatise on human existence ever written, and I don’t know how anybody else gets through life without having read it at least twice.)

Bergman’s six episode mini-series Scenes From a Marriage (1973) (there is also an edited-down movie version that I haven’t seen) explores the emotions and actions of Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann), beginning ten years into their marriage and ending ten years after their divorce. The movie opens with the couple being interviewed for a Women’s magazine, because Marianne is a successful lawyer specializing in divorce, and right away I knew these were two people I was not going to like. Johan is a smug and manipulative egomaniac and Marianne is basically a doormat. Most relevantly, both of them are completely oblivious of themselves.

To succinctly summarize, the mini-series consists of both of them figuring out they’re oblivious and continually making self-destructive choices and questionable compromises while inefficiently trying to discover who they are. They generally resort to blaming their upbringing or each other for their problems and usually idiotically seek for solutions in sex. In the end, they resign from trying to determine or discover what they want out of life, content in feeling like they understand each other.

Bergman forces us to voyeuristically watch their intense interactions, which are often disturbing and occasionally fascinating, but I could never find myself empathizing or caring for either character. Actually, I rarely like any of Bergman’s characters, and I suspect he doesn’t particularly like them either. He seems fascinated with the human tendencies to continually and consciously repeat our mistakes, our willingness to torture ourselves by living with our mistakes, our lack of hindsight in properly identifying them, our lack of foresight in predicting them and our lack of fortitude and motivation in fixing them.