Scenes From a Marriage Review: Gripping Case Study

Ingmar Bergman’s miniseries Scenes From a Marriage is a complex, emotionally violent examination of love and marriage.

They have been married for ten years and live in a Stockholm apartment with two young daughters (who are referred to, but only seen on screen for a split second). The marriage is a content one and their life together is the bourgeois ideal; peaceful and stable, filled with trips to the theatre for plays by Strindberg and Ibsen and symphonies by Bach, Sunday dinner with the In-Laws, and summers at the cottage in the country. Yes, together Johann and Marianne have achieved the ideal life. 

At one point during the interview, Johann and Marianne both have to step away for a moment and the interviewer takes the opportunity to snoop around. She opens a door off the parlor to find a bedroom strewn with dirty clothes and newspaper pages. For the next four hours and forty-three minutes, Ingmar Bergman will lead the audience through Johann and Marianne’s dirty laundry, looking at the ugly and imperfect parts of human relationships with the precision of a microscope. Scenes From a Marriage is Bergman’s anguished search for a definition of love; an attempt to emotionally and mentally reconcile the fact that love is both a weapon and a balm.

The six episodes of the miniseries take Johann and Marianne through marriage, infidelity, separation, divorce and reconciliation, through moments of contentment and moments of agony. Throughout it all, even as the two somnambulantly go through the motions of a relationship or say the most horrid, wicked things to one another, there is love. The human truth that Scenes From a Marriage gets to is that love and pain can exist at the same time. 

The miniseries is made out of six episodes entitled, “Innocence and Panic,” “The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug,” “Paula,” “The Vale of Tears,” “The Illiterates,” and “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World.” In the beginning, Johann and Marianne are play-acting at a happy marriage, but so consumed with fulfilling their role in the social contract they are unaware of the performance. They blithely discuss the ins-and-outs of their lives – meeting up at a restaurant for lunch, debating the latest production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and making plans for a summer vacation – but the conversations and physical affection are perfunctory and habitual. The sex is unfulfilling.

One day, during a weekend trip to the country cottage, Johann announces that he has been carrying on an affair for several months with a young woman named Paula and wishes to have a divorce. The divorce gets nasty, but in the midst of the bitterness, insults and disrespect, Johann and Marianne are able to tell each other the truth for the first time in years. Both remarry people that are never shown on screen, but the connection between the two never dissipates, despite the divorce, and they begin an affair. They return to their country cottage for the weekend, and the viewer is able to see how much has changed: Johann has become more vulnerable, Marianne more independent, and both are able to communicate with each other in a gentler, more mature manner. Despite the legal divorce, the marriage metaphorically persists. Johann and Marianne are two people who have touched each other’s lives, who loved each other, as Johann says, “in an earthly and imperfect way.” 

This miniseries does not cover any new territory for Bergman. Found here is the same examination of social masks and conventions, the same despair at the silence that can occur between a couple, the operatic and anguished monologues, the shocking bursts of emotional violence. In his films, such as The Seventh Seal or Hour of the Wolf or Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman’s approach tends toward the symbolic, filled with dream sequences, archetypal characters and metaphor. His is a world in which Max Von Sydow can play chess with Death.

In sharp contrast to the fantastical elements of his previous work, Scenes From a Marriage is made out of pure quotidian details. Working with his longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist, his cinematographer for such movies as Persona and Cries and Whispers, the miniseries is shot on 16mm, giving it the grainy, raw and semi-improvisatory look of reality television. It is shot mostly in claustrophobically tight close-ups on Ullmann and Josephson’s face, isolating the characters from their surroundings and each other to powerful effect. Every wrinkle and minute twinge of expression on the actor’s face is visible to the audience. There are no means for an actor to lie underneath Nykvist’s x-ray-like camera, and Ullmann and Josephson are up for the challenge, both delivering harrowing, vulnerable performances. 

Scenes From a Marriage is a gripping mix of the epic and intimate. Johann and Marianne are, frankly, rather boring individuals, but through Bergman’s psychological insight and the commanding performances of Ullmann and Josephson they are able to express something profound and moving about the unseemly parts of human nature. They are recognizable human beings with recognizable strengths and anxieties. Scenes From a Marriage does not take sides in Johann and Marianne’s relationship, presenting all of their hurts and flaws in a dry, non-judgemental manner, as though it was a couple’s counselor reciting a case study. Here, Scenes From a Marriage says, here is love with all of its faults, selfishness, complexities, hope, and beauty. 

Scenes From a Marriage is now available to watch on digital and on demand. Read our retrospective on Ingmar Bergman and religion!