Scenes From A Marriage (1973)

I always feel intimidated when I first start a Bergman film. This intimidation does not come from a coldness or dislike towards Ingmar Bergman, but rather from his ability to expose certain anxieties of my own life. His Wild Strawberries affected me on such a level that I'm afraid to go back and watch it right now. It might have been a religious experience, in the sense that it opened up the world and my expectations of it. It asked questions that I had never considered; it showed our questions about death in an unflinching light. I'm haunted by the Professor's fidgeting in his bed as he awaits an ever-nearing death. Bergman has a certain ability to penetrate our existential fears and put them on the table and merely look at them and wonder over them.

I wanted to watch Scenes From A Marriage, then, because I felt that Bergman would be the best man to speak to me directly with issues that have taken place in my recent life. I thought that I might be able to find another movie that affected me on that plane of personal intimacy. In short, I wanted answers for what was going wrong in my own life. If that can be mirrored on film, let me try that.

Roger Ebert calls this movie (I'm paraphrasing) one of the truest and most pure love stories to ever grace the screen. I'm not sure if it's a love story, but I do think that it is about as true as one can get when talking about people caught up in love. Love does not exist within societal boundaries like marriage or divorce. Johan and Marianne find that out by going through all the motions that many married couples go through. On paper, it looks clean and honest and "fair". In dark rooms in quiet places in the universe, fairness and legality wait in the hallway. One of Bergman's common themes is communication and its common failures. I sat there trying to figure out when Marianne and Johan were sincere and when they were bluffing, when they were trying to hurt each other and when they were trying to win the other one back. Sometimes, I felt I could detect this within them, other times I had to look away in agony. Sex is used both as a weapon and as a guilty pleasure. They both go on the offensive and defensive, but none ever seems able to score.

The most comforting thing about this movie was knowing that these themes are universal. I watched this movie and found almost every frame to be absolutely true. Despite the sorrow of the movie, this truth reassured me. It reassured me that this is the human condition, to love uncontrollably. It comforted me with my own problems taking place in life right now, and maybe that is why Woody ALlen is right when he says Bergman is the best film artist out there. Allen says that we leave Bergman films not depressed, but totally uplifted because we just witnessed art at its highest capability. If art is supposed to mirror life, to reflect on our failures and flaws as human beings, then Bergman is the man for the job. I did not leave this movie feeling depressed; I felt calm, sleepy even. I had witnessed something that was sad, yes, and even sorrowful, but I had the reassuring feeling that it was inexplicably true.