What They are to Each Other

Last night I finished Scenes from a Marriage, Ingmar Bergman's 1973 miniseries. It was good from the beginning but by the end it achieves a stranger power as the title becomes an increasingly bold statement.

The latter half of the series might have been better titled Dissolution and Remnants of a Marriage as we watch Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullman) first separate, go through a lengthy divorce process, and finally are married to other people.

Yet each episode features the two coming together and having long conversations in each others' arms, even having sex. They shift back and forth from angry rebukes to passionate pleas. One minute Johan claims he has always hated Marianne, and has had this thought every time he's had sex with her--the next minute, he's pleading with her to take him back. Marianne casually mentions never having had an orgasm until she had sex with a man named Henrik, after she'd divorced Johan. And yet it's with Johan she sneaks away to a summer house while Henrik's out of town.

With all these extreme contradictions, one might expect the quality of writing to be on the level of a silly soap opera. Bergman's genius, though, makes all of this completely credible, the confusion and contradiction always real. We watch Johan slowly transform from a content, confident, and respected professor to a man whom the world has taken down several pegs. One woman, as kindly as possible, informs him how bad his poetry is. A prestigious job in America quietly evaporates. At first Johan bitterly complains to Marianne about campus politics and conspiracies before finally accepting he was just never as amazing as he thought he was.

Marianne has learned to be more confident, more in touch with her own feelings (and not just when it comes to orgasms). Arguably, their separation and separate marriages have made Johan and Marianne a better couple by the end of the series. And yet Marianne fearfully clings to Johan and, with genuine desperation, asks why she's never loved him. Are the two of them, in the end, simply friends, comrades who know each other better than anyone else, or are they something more? Which is the more comforting answer?

Scenes from a Marriage is available on The Criterion Channel.