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DVD Scenes From a Marriage - Criterion Collection
Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage opens with a couple--Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson)--being interviewed for a magazine. Every moment seems to teeter on the brink of some rupture; just as they start to get comfortable, the interviewer has them freeze for a photograph. After making some bland general statements, they both start admitting intimate details, confessing that they were brought together by mutual misery, then cheerfully claiming that theirs is a model marriage. The entirety of Scenes from a Marriage, which chronicles their emotional relationship even after their divorce and marriages to other people, continues to have these contradictory moments of honesty and self-deception, cruelty and kindness, concern and self-obsession--all laid bare by the skillful actors and the subtle, constantly shifting screenplay. Every scene is a small movie unto itself; in fact, Scenes from a Marriage was originally a six-episode TV show, which was carefully edited down into a unified film. This is one of Bergman's most immediate and accessible works, concerned more with the facts of human behavior than symbolism or abstract themes. Bergman understands how to balance what could be horrible pain and despair with the characters' earnest efforts to improve their lives. His imitators reduce everything to sheer suffering and alienation; Bergman sees the best in his characters, even when their actions are terrible. This 1973 film won numerous awards, including several acting honors for Ullmann. --Bret Fetzer
Review(s): DVD Scenes From a Marriage - Criterion Collection
Scenes from a Marriage - Criterion Collection
After seeing the recent release Saraband in the theatre, it was an absolute necessity to see the start of the saga. I was delighted to enjoy the intense emotions portrayed by the actors. It was a riveting look inside a marriage that is working well, or is it?
Spectacularly...DEVASTATING!
I watched this film in two sittings, in part because of the length (2:48) but also because of the sheer density and weight of the material onscreen. Like all Bergman films this one takes you deep into the psyche of its main characters with a mix of intensity and realism AND surrealism that is absolutely breathtaking, original and refreshingly unpredictable.
One of Bergman's trademarks is his slow camera that lingers over closeups of the actors' faces, as if thrusting their naked, twisted and unknowable emotions straight into our own faces. There is an element of ruthlessness but also of compassion in this type of camera work. So many times during the movie I found myself thinking, "Now this is where most directors would pull back for a full body or medium or long-distance shot rather than stay in uncomfortable and intrusive closeup range. The aesthetic here is both spare and unsparing...unlike most of today's movies it does not have any musical score at all to lean on, instead Bergman relies on the depth of his characters and the skill of his camera and cast to keep the viewer riveted.
A true masterwork from a true master! This is one film definitely worth owning, like a good novel it has many many layers and nuances and undefinable moments that you can go back to again and again and notice new things each time.
Deserves 10 stars, really. Next to Bergman, today's directors are children.
A Bergman Masterpiece
From its uncompromising script, through Sven Nykvist's deft camerawork to the flawless honesty of its acting, this film delivers one of the transcendent emotional experiences in world cinema. Its themes of personal and sexual liberation, as well as the emerging feminist perspective of its heroine, give it a definite period feel (early 1970s), but its concerns are timeless. In one great scene after another, Bergman lays bare our basic human conundrum: the need to be separate and autonomous wars with our need to be connected.
The opening scene is an interview with Johan (Erland Josephson) and his wife, Marianne (Liv Ullman) about their marriage. Self-satisfied Johan preens as he describes how perfect they are as a couple. Marianne, deferential, beams with quiet pride at his side. Despite their warm words, their bodies seem oddly out of rythym with each other, a clue to further cracks we soon see in the couple's smooth façade. She's not as devoted to their sex life as he is, and both of them resent the tyrannical sway of her parents. We watch Marianne try to tell her mother that they won't be coming as usual for Sunday dinner, and then quickly back off when her mother objects.
Johan is a closet poet. When he shares some poems with an old college friend, she tells him not to bother sending them to a publisher. In a quietly devastating aside, she tells him that back in their university days, their entire circle thought that Johann would advance much further than the rest of them. The implication is, of course, that he hasn't. Stalled in mid-career as a researcher, and chafed by the demands of domesticity, Johan undergoes a classic midlife crisis. He comes home from work one night and tells Marianne that he's fallen in love with a twenty-four year old colleague. He's leaving the marriage and moving to Paris with her. The rest of the movie traces the emotional contours of their separation, divorce, and post-divorce reconciliations.
The abandoned Marianne slowly frees herself from the hold Johan and a conventional marriage had on her. That freer person soon discovers her sensual side, and over time becomes the person Johann would actually rather be with. But it's too late; she's moved beyond him. In a scene as believable as it is wrenching, they meet in Johan's office to sign their divorce papers. They both need answers for why they failed at something to which they gave the best of themselves. And by now, Johan understands that freeing himself from Marianne didn't free him from his own limitations. His frustration and disappointment boil over into brandy-fueled violence.
The sad truth this movie reveals is that people can love each other without understanding each other, or they can understand each other without loving each other in the ways that they need to be loved. Bergman seems to be saying that nothing in the institution of marriage alters these facts. In the end, Johan and Marianne, both married to other people, still make room for the bond between them, a bond too deep to not acknowledge, but not deep enough to keep them from forsaking all others. They're not reconciled, exactly, but they've achieved the peace that comes from ceasing to struggle. As they hold each other through a long night, they look, and we feel, somehow hopeful. Bergman's great achievement is to make Johan and Marianne stand in for all of us, who are selfish and insecure, but heroic in our efforts to achieve any little clarity before the lights go dim.
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Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film, photographed by Sven Nykvist, begins when famous actress Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) freezes on stage in the middle of a performance. Struck dumb by an unknown cause, she winds up in the care of young inexperienced nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson), and together they retreat to the seaside for the summer, where they enter into an uncommon intimacy and clash of wills. Bergman's study of the fragility of the human being and the treachery of life is incredibly moving in its perception and unrivaled imagery. And as always with Bergman and his reappearing ensemble of actors, the performances are flawless. Especially notable is the scene in which Alma recounts for the silent Elisabeth a morally and emotionally ambivalent erotic encounter she had experienced on a beach... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Bibi Andersson - Liv Ullmann Director(s): Ingmar Bergman DVD Release Date: Released the 10 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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One doesn't think of Ingmar Bergman as a director of action or thriller (genre) movies. But he directs the war sequences in "Shame" with stunning confidence. It seems he could have made many more big (even epic) movies if he had been so inclined. This film features Bergman veterans Von Sydow and Ullmann as ordinary people who are turned into refugees by a ferocious war in which they get caught. They lose everything, are harassed, beaten and exploited. Eventually the neurotic Von Sydow proves he will do anything to survive. Simone Weil once wrote "the great mystery of life is not suffering, but affliction." That is: suffering brings out the best in some people, others it turns into beasts. This movie asks that most painful question: what would you do in the same situation? The film... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Liv Ullmann - Max von Sydow Director(s): Ingmar Bergman DVD Release Date: Released the 20 April 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
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