Leo Tolstoy once opined that all happy families are happy in but a few ways, while those that are not suffer in many unique ways. This apothegm was never more well evinced than in filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's five hour 1973 Swedish telefilm Scenes From A Marriage (Scener ur ett aktenskap), a miniseries that was even more influential in Europe than the American television miniseries Roots, which captivated American audiences only a few years later. Bergman's miniseries was repackaged for foreign markets into a 169 minute film version that, in 1974, was almost universally lauded by critics in America. Although, because it started out as a TV show, it was ineligible for Oscar consideration in America, it did win the National Society Of Film Critics Award for Best Picture, and, in 1977, PBS aired the entire uncut series. In many ways, it had more in common with such offerings as the U.K.'s Up Series documentaries, or PBS's An American Family, which chronicled the ups and downs of the real life Loud family. It was a film that also radically departed from many prior Bergmanian paradigms, even as it continued his in depth exploration of the interior human landscape.
Gone was the poetic and dazzling cinematography of Sven Nykvist, as it was replaced by an even more obsessive look at the human mien, especially the gloriously radiant features of actress Liv Ullman's face. Ullman portrays Marianne, the female lead of the series, a thirty-five year old liberal leaning divorce lawyer who is married to a more culturally conservative forty-two year old professor and researcher at the Psychotechnology Institute, as well as a wannabe poet named Johan, played by Erland Josephson. We never learn the couple's surname, which only adds to their everycouple iconography, and the intimacy viewers feel with and for them. The couple's two daughters, Eva and Karin, make only a brief appearance at the start of both versions, although they are mentioned a few times more in the series. As the film version opens, the couple is being interviewed by a female writer (Anita Wall) for a woman's magazine, after ten years of marriage, and there are some awkward moments that belie the problems awaiting them just under the surface of their claims of being almost a too content couple. We are not sure whether this scene is the present- meaning 1973, or ten years earlier, for the series will progress over a decade. The TV version goes farther than the film version, and the first scene, or night's viewing, is titled Innocence And Panic. We see more hostility bared- overtly and covertly, and find out the interviewer is a passive/aggressive old schoolmate of Marianne's whom she is not too fond of . ultimately, Scenes From A Marriage is a great work of art, and one that will still have relevance as long as human beings involve themselves in mating rituals. While it details a marriage, that marriage fails not because of the husband's midlife crisis, nor does it even fail because of the wife's first infidelity and over-compensatory smothering, but because the two characters were simply ill suited for one another- personally, emotionally, politically, sexually, and philosophically. No matter how well they knew each other, and we know that they know each other all too well, basic incompatibility cannot be overcome. Thus the greatest lesson the film teaches is not how to act during marriage, but to choose well before entering into it, because that is the single most important choice a would be spouse can make, and gives rise to the maxim that Tolstoy spouted. Were that not so Scenes From A Marriage would not be as engrossing, insightful, and relevant a work of art as it still is, as it would be like so many other marriages and films in the real world- thriving on the low hum of ignorance that its participants and viewers enjoy.
Gone was the poetic and dazzling cinematography of Sven Nykvist, as it was replaced by an even more obsessive look at the human mien, especially the gloriously radiant features of actress Liv Ullman's face. Ullman portrays Marianne, the female lead of the series, a thirty-five year old liberal leaning divorce lawyer who is married to a more culturally conservative forty-two year old professor and researcher at the Psychotechnology Institute, as well as a wannabe poet named Johan, played by Erland Josephson. We never learn the couple's surname, which only adds to their everycouple iconography, and the intimacy viewers feel with and for them. The couple's two daughters, Eva and Karin, make only a brief appearance at the start of both versions, although they are mentioned a few times more in the series. As the film version opens, the couple is being interviewed by a female writer (Anita Wall) for a woman's magazine, after ten years of marriage, and there are some awkward moments that belie the problems awaiting them just under the surface of their claims of being almost a too content couple. We are not sure whether this scene is the present- meaning 1973, or ten years earlier, for the series will progress over a decade. The TV version goes farther than the film version, and the first scene, or night's viewing, is titled Innocence And Panic. We see more hostility bared- overtly and covertly, and find out the interviewer is a passive/aggressive old schoolmate of Marianne's whom she is not too fond of . ultimately, Scenes From A Marriage is a great work of art, and one that will still have relevance as long as human beings involve themselves in mating rituals. While it details a marriage, that marriage fails not because of the husband's midlife crisis, nor does it even fail because of the wife's first infidelity and over-compensatory smothering, but because the two characters were simply ill suited for one another- personally, emotionally, politically, sexually, and philosophically. No matter how well they knew each other, and we know that they know each other all too well, basic incompatibility cannot be overcome. Thus the greatest lesson the film teaches is not how to act during marriage, but to choose well before entering into it, because that is the single most important choice a would be spouse can make, and gives rise to the maxim that Tolstoy spouted. Were that not so Scenes From A Marriage would not be as engrossing, insightful, and relevant a work of art as it still is, as it would be like so many other marriages and films in the real world- thriving on the low hum of ignorance that its participants and viewers enjoy.