Scenes from a Marriage (1999)

Scenes from a Marriage Daniel Ross June 1999 There must still be marriages where the spouses, by assuming in an uncomplicated way that they have joined forces for life, not only believe they will but do in fact remain together until death breaks the happy circle. Is it possible to learn the secret of this success? Woody Allen suggests such couples must either be shallow and empty, have no ideas and nothing interesting to say, or be using a large vibrating egg. If we cannot learn from the happy and the content, can we even learn anything from the miserable and the failures? For are not all happy families alike, but all unhappy families unhappy in their own way? Nevertheless it is impossible to resist trying to decide where Johan and Marianne went wrong, to draw some kind of lesson. What it is about their characters, their morals, their upbringing, that took them off the path of connubial harmony? What does their dishonesty with themselves and each other, the hypocrisies and contradictions and rationalizations, the failures to communicate, teach us? In short, it is difficult not to respond to Scenes from a Marriage as though it were “a schoolbook on lifemanship,” as Johan says in its concluding chapter. Yet Johan cannot stand it, even if many of the lessons to be drawn are correct, and many of the points to be observed are valuable. It is as though he feels that the very act of drawing conclusions and making important retrospective observations cannot help but be untruthful, cannot help but devalue the meaning of the relationship, cannot help be either just another layer of bourgeois intellectualizations and analysis, or else the pseudo-naïve and equally unconvincing refusal of analysis. It is possible to make all kinds of recommendations, to point out the pitfalls to be avoided, to learn from experience (one’s own and others’), to retain the ambition to be able to tell the tale of life as one of success and harmony, of obstacles avoided or overcome by the use of wisdom, pragmatism, negotiation, persistence or commonsense—but perhaps this will always be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet the temptation to take Scenes from a Marriage as a textbook on lifemanship remains. An apparently destructive and unhappy couple must be the photographic negative of the picture we carry of ourselves (this is how Marianne sees Katarina and Peter). But the film does present itself in the form of a case study of modern marriage. Unusually for Bergman there is little symbolism (beyond the “scientific” symbolism of Johan’s dot experiment), no religious

anguish, no flashbacks or dream sequences, no music. Visually, there are closeups and interiors; aurally, there is dialogue. It is like a fictionalized variation on the 7-Up series, or a training film for relationship counsellors. The greatest departure is the sequence of photographs of Liv Ullmann from childhood to bride, which we see when Marianne reads to Johan the thoughts she has written down, and which only reinforces the documentary style. There is a kind of inevitability that draws discussion about Scenes from a Marriage away from “film theory,” away even from questions of the film’s meaning or message, and toward “our” responses to the characters and their actions. What is there to say about it “as a film” other than that the camera records great acting performing great writing? And this only makes “theorists” uncomfortable: firstly because any discourse concerning “greatness” is suspicious; secondly because saying anything intelligible about acting is difficult. Is Scenes from a Marriage, then, more “theatrical” than “cinematic”? Failing to exploit those possibilities unique to the cinema, is it not more of a filmed play than a movie? Bergman in fact subsequently put Scenes from a Marriage on the stage. But, by his own admission, it failed, because “the acting, the way, the approach” is so different in the theatre. 1 Rather than being theatrical at the expense of the cinematic, the apparently theatrical quality of the film intensifies and focuses the question of what the aesthetic pleasure of cinema consists in. To not include music is a decision in a movie, but not in a play. No stage-acting could bring the audience inside the relationship in the way this movie achieves through its concentrated visual style. Unlike some other Bergman films, it does not try to ultimately penetrate the core of the characters’ being—at the end we and they are still not sure who Johan and Marianne really are, when what they say or do really expresses what is truly going on. Perhaps it is because it is about a marriage that the individuals remain enigmatic—to observe a relationship is something different from looking inside two individuals who relate. Nevertheless this is cinema at its most voyeuristic—we are inside the room, the marriage, the scene. Scenes from a Marriage is about the difficulties or impossibilities of sexual relationships today. Bergman wavers on whether it is ultimately optimistic or pessimistic.2 He perhaps knows it is the wrong question to ask. It is not about how to live, but about what it means to be living. If this movie is more than a textbook on lifemanship, if it is more than a “psychological exploration,” then this is because not only the characters within the film but the film itself does not in the end 1Bergman,

in G. William Jones (ed.), Talking with Ingmar Bergman, SMU Press, Dallas, 1978, p. 43. 2Cf., ibid., p. 67, and his comments on the screenplay in Bergman, Scenes from a Marriage, Bantam, New York, 1974, p. vii.

possess the terms for any kind of “solution” to the problems it poses. To demand a solution is still not to have experienced the problem. Scenes from a Marriage is unconcerned with a ubiquitous contemporary obsession—the consequences for the children. There are children here, they are not unimportant, the fruit of a sexual relationship, but not the relationship itself. What happens to the children is another story—the relationship is what happens between these two people. External forces and pressures, “contexts,” without doubt influence and shape what occurs, yet relationships take place in their own world, a world the laws of which may remain undiscovered by its inhabitants. Johan and Marianne may frequently be childish, childhood may be something that neither can nor should be entirely left behind, but Scenes from a Marriage is nevertheless a movie that is resolutely about and for grown-ups.