Scenes from a Marriage

The Bergman one, not the new HBO one

“If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry,” wrote Chekhov in his diary. Situated as we are after many decades of feminism, no-fault divorce, the decline of the nuclear family, and so on, the myth that marriage always represents a Happily Ever After isn’t one that’s shocking to puncture.

Still, writers turn back to it again and again, and it’s not hard to see why. A marriage (or any other committed romantic partnership), especially a long-lasting one, is the most intimate relationship that the majority of people will have in their lives — as well as the relationship that situates them in society and, along with their profession, makes them legible to others. As a crucible of emotion, vulnerability, weakness, and revelation, what storyteller could resist the topic?

Earlier this year I watched the 2021 HBO remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, primarily because Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain are two of the most beautiful people I have ever seen on screen. But in terms of emotional impact, it is not anywhere near the equal of Bergman’s emotionally bruising 1973 original, which is the version I’ll discuss here.

Erland Josephson as Johan and Liv Ullmann as Marianne in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage.

Bergman’s movies have a reputation for being chilly and difficult, but Scenes from a Marriage, a miniseries in six hour-long episodes, is very watchable for non-cinephiles. It can be streamed on HBO in an abbreviated version (if you must), and the full six-episode version on the Criterion Channel (preferable).

It opens with Johan, the husband, and Marianne, the wife, being interviewed by a magazine as representatives of a picture-perfect marriage, and from this detail alone, we know there is trouble ahead. When asked to say a few words about themselves, Johann holds forth at length about his qualities and accomplishments, puffing himself up, mostly but not entirely tongue-in-cheek. Marianne, shy and uncomfortable, can’t think of very much to say about herself except that she is the mother of two daughters. Despite this, we learn that she, too, has an accomplished career as a divorce lawyer. There’s chemistry between the two. They have an easy way with each other; they banter and tease. They are drawn to each other’s presence, entirely at home in each other’s company. But we know, because this is the setup for a television show about marriage, that something, somewhere is festering.

The first sign of trouble comes in the main crisis of the first episode: Marianne discovers she is pregnant with what would be their third child. She tells Johan apologetically, equivocally, saying she’s not sure if she wants to have the baby; the truth is that she is unsure of his reaction, and her own feelings will depend on his response. Johan answers as though she’s just proposed they try a different vacation destination: mildly pleased, but not excited. Whatever you think is best, he tells her, sanguine and almost self-congratulatory in his equanimity, making it clear that it doesn’t really matter to him one way or the other. This was not the reaction she had hoped for. She chooses to have an abortion.

We see Marianne try, repeatedly, to interest Johan in their shared life. Would he like to travel, or perhaps try a change of routine? His reaction is the same, polite indifference. Then one day the grenade explodes: he tells her he’s fallen in love with a younger woman and is running away with her, possibly forever.

Many of the situations in which Bergman’s couple find themselves are now clichés of the literature of unhappy marriages. They argue about whose fault it is that their sex life has dwindled, about domesticity and its various traps. There are affairs and reconciliations. There are the standard midlife crisis regrets about the road not taken, the other paths that might have been open to them if they hadn’t settled for a conventional bourgeois life. And over the course of six episodes, they rip into each other and blame each other and bring each other drinks and sandwiches and comfort and beg and reminisce.

The magic of Scenes from a Marriage is that, though the situations seem shopworn, the dialogue never is. Every time I thought I knew where a conversation was going, there was a surprising reversal. So many times I expected a character to spout platitudes, or react in some preordained way, only for the characters to surprise me. I avoided reading any criticism or analysis of the show because I truly could not predict what would happen in each episode — if you’d asked me whether I thought the couple would be together in the end or part ways, I wouldn’t have been able to say which was more likely.

The first two episodes take place in relative marital tranquility, excepting a vicious fight between two of their married friends, in which the visiting couple forebodingly spends a dinner party flinging acid at each other (I’m fairly certain the scene inspired this song in Sondheim’s Follies). Then things really get going: from the third episode through to the end there are devastating emotional fireworks every time, so much that I finished each installment stunned and nearly reeling.

Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson in Scenes from a Marriage.

The most difficult episode for me was the fourth, titled The Vale of Tears. They don’t fight much in this one — it’s the moments of tenderness and gentleness, and the sparks of hope that illuminate Liv Ullmann’s constantly-shifting gaze, that make it especially devastating.

I suspect most viewers will be on Team Marianne, the more sympathetic of the pair (last year’s remake attempted to remedy the sympathy imbalance by doing a bit of gender-swapping). But Johan is never a caricature or a stand-in for cultural grievance. One way that the series dates itself is in its reminder of just how little fathers in the 1970’s were expected to care about their children: when Johan walks out, Marianne asks only that he remember to call his daughters on their birthdays. But part of the elegance and genius of the writing is that they are never quite opponents, and the moments when they do tear into each other are carefully husbanded and distributed judiciously (one, in particular, is actually shocking in its violence). The viewer is always aware that these are two people who are very close to each other, who love each other. Each continues to crave the other’s physical presence; they kiss, they hold hands, they look at each other with tenderness. In the midst of everything they never quite stop wanting to have sex.

Nothing between them is a foregone conclusion. The balance of power shifts and shifts again as they circle around each other like partners in a waltz. Even if that particular dance floor seems crowded with fictional couples repeating the same miserable steps, you really can’t take your eyes off them.

---

You may enjoy these past newsletters, which also touch on marriage in literature and art:

If you're afraid of loneliness

Eve and the Serpent