Scenes from a Marriage [Television Version] (1973)

TV-PG which might be the most inaccurate rating in all of my history with doing this blog.  This movie has nudity, domestic abuse, and is almost first-and-foremost about sex.  It's about adultery and two people who treat each other terribly.  I know it's 1973 Sweden and that standards are different.  I even acknowledge that the TV-PG isn't even accurate because that rating system didn't exist in 1973.  Still, man...it's a lot.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

Do you realize how tempted I am to watch Berlin Alexanderplatz after this?  I mean, I'm doing so much writing, that this has to be the time to knock out some of the longer movies that I'll have a hard time getting to later.  This movie...took a lot out of me.  Besides the fact that it is five hours long, this might be the first Bergman movie that I genuinely got frustrated at.  

There might be an unsaid criticism (or perhaps it's stated very clearly in some circles) that Bergman is too intellectual.  Now, so far I've been quasi-enjoying my trip through the Bergman box.  I mean, I just came off of the television version of Fanny and Alexander, which I thought might be a perfect film.  And I would be the first to admit that watching all of these Bergman movies might be the most intimidating film projects I've attempted.  After all, I've been called out on some truly awful insights into some of his movies.  As an apology, I'm going to say that almost all of my blogs are written in the light of a first viewing with little to almost no research.    But part of that intimidation is that Bergman is often equated with high art through his complex direction and narratives.  But Scenes from a Marriage might be a step too far in the wrong direction.  Also, I'd like to point out that I'm almost guaranteed in the minority for people who probably don't care for this movie.  Let's pretend that I'm brave for writing all of this.

At its core, this movie has the right idea.  I think it is fascinating watching a marriage that is thought to be safe falling apart.  There's a story to be told there and, if I had to summarize the movie, Scenes from a Marriage has everything needed to tell that story.  I might even shift a little bit when I watch the shorter theatrical cut because a lot of my frustration comes from how much time we spend with these two awful people.  But after watching so many Bergman movies in such a short time, I can't help but notice the repeated motif of casual affairs.  Maybe it's a cultural thing that we might not have as prevalent in the States, but Bergman almost exclusively tells stories about what I'll refer to as the "intellectual logical affair."  There's consistent discussions about how everyone has affairs.  It's not like the concept of the affair doesn't involve cruelty on the part of the Swedes.  It's just that they compartmentalize that fury into calm and collected responses.  Scenes of a Marriage does have emotional moments, where Marianne responds appropriately to the injustices thrust upon her.  It's just that they are in all of the wrong moments.  Also, they are always following these few and far between emotional outbursts with logical, stilted discussion. 

Honestly, they are insufferable.  The entire movie, both of them are the most chokable human beings that ever lived.  Even more insane is that we have to somewhat bond with Marianne because Johan is never likable.  The first episode establishes that Marianne and Johan believe they have a solid marriage.  Marianne is enamored with Johan (although in context of the later parts of the film, that may be a lie that they tell themselves) and I don't know why.  There's no moment where Johan shows himself to be a sympathetic character. He starts the film tooting his own horn as Marianne, for some reason, lives in this modest mouse kind of attitude.  We find out later that she is not the character that she portrays at the beginning of the movie.  It could be that Marianne has gone through so much pain that she grows into the character that we see by the end of the film.  But we also found out in the last fifteen minutes that Marianne was the first one to have an affair.  But Johan straight up beats his wife after admitting to beating Paula.  He is the one who abandons his family, which includes two girls and that's just part of the way people act in this world.  Heck, Marianne helps Johan pack.  Not in a passive aggressive way.  Instead, she just wants to be helpful to the man who is abandoning her.  It's really a bit much.

Now, here's me trying to be gracious.  There is this idea that Bergman is almost fighting the notion of the melodrama, even though the entire film feels like a black box melodrama that leans way too much on script over performance.  Maybe he wants to intentionally subvert archetypal adultery stories by saving the emotional moments for the post-intellectual discussion.  But if this is about a marriage that is falling apart, it feels so off.  I'm not saying that some people don't approach affairs with an aura of aloofness.  It's just that I don't see a marriage here.  Everything is about the selfishness of the couple.  There's a lot of talk about the children, but almost no appearance of the children.  Marianne, who is stuck with all of the fallout that Johan's leaving.  is barely ever seen with the children.  She occasionally mentions how hard it is on her and the children, but it seems to be the last thing on her mind when it comes to reuniting the children with their father.  (It should be noted that the girls see Johan because they mention that in dialogue.)  But this movie is about the moments over the course of years following their separation and we get the distinct impression that the girls have almost no influence over their lives.  They meet up for secret meals at restaurants.  They have torrid affairs all of the time.  They are constantly in some form of having a date.  Then they complain how hard their lives are.

Maybe my biggest concern is that it never really feels like a marriage, especially in the light of children.  If this was a two-income-no-children house, I could potentially seeing this being kind of accurate from an "I imagine this to be accurate" perspective.  But we only get one shot of Marianne refusing to pick up some Donald Duck comic books and that's really the only parenting we get out of this film.

And also, five hours?  Five hours.  The one thing that the five hours accomplished in terms of watching this movie is the idea that a lot of time has passed since the first episode to the last.  But the movie's only real progression is the fact that the two get more toxic the further that the movie progresses.  I mean, it's got the same issue that watching too many Woody Allen movies do.  These movies try to imbue a universal truth to what is fundamentally an Ingmar Bergman thing.  I just Googled "Did Ingmar Bergman have a lot of affairs?" and the answer was "Absolutely."  Similarly, he seemed to intellectually justify his affairs, claiming he was a different person to many different people.  That's where the movie alienates me a bit.  A movie called Scenes from a Marriage takes a core relatable moment and seems to do anything it can to make it only about Bergman's attitude towards marriage.  Heck, I would even say that Bergman is indulging in some self-flagellation by making Johan's character seemingly Bergman himself.  (Sorry, I don't know enough about Bergman himself to confidently say that.  But my headcanon says that he had that same sense of intellectual greatness that allowed him to be divorced from morality like Crime and Punishment. 

It's been a while since I've been so annoyed by a movie.  It might come from the fact that I adored Fanny and Alexander so much that I expected another Bergman super-sized story to be something as glorious as that masterpiece.  But I watched every minute of this movie, including the voiced-over credits on every episode.  One of my least favorite comments that people have about movies is that there are no likable characters.  Well, now I'm in that camp.  This was five hours of two people who drove me up the wall. They were just both so comfortable with ruining people's lives through affairs.  They also live in a world where affairs are so commonplace that people can have casual conversations about them and who they would like to have affairs.  Again, I get that there probably a world out there that lives like this.  But from my perspective, this is a world that I don't want to live in.  It's a world where no one takes another person's feeling into account and that's just not fun. There's nothing fun about this movie.  It's intellectual acrobatics that makes it feel like you are watching a script heavy play at an alternative black box theater.  It's almost rage inducing.