Scenes From a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)

Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann in Scenes From a Marriage

It's said that when the six-episode miniseries aired on Swedish television, it was followed by a doubling of the divorce rate in Sweden. But that way lies the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. In the United States, it's best known for the 167-minute version that Bergman edited for theatrical release, which is the way it's usually seen today, and which I watched last night. I remember being bowled over by it when I saw it the first time, sometime in 1975, and compared it favorably to A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974), which I found shrill and overwrought. The two films have different aims, of course: Bergman's is focused on what appears at the beginning to be a happy, equally partnered relationship, whereas Cassavetes is preoccupied with mental disorder. That the relationship of Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) eventually succumbs to its latent instability exposes the dynamic of every long-term commitment. Modern marriage, more easily dissolved than the ones our grandparents or great-grandparents experienced, is subjected to the searing glare of the five-times-married Bergman and found wanting. At the film's beginning, we are presented with the contrast of the relationship of Marianne and Johan with the viciously dysfunctional one of Katarina (Bibi Andersson) and Peter (Jan Malmsjö) and lulled into the expectation that the former couple have the strength to overcome the stresses that are evident: the placatory nature of Marianne, herself a divorce lawyer, and the egoism of Johan, an ambitious scientist. But the point of Scenes of a Marriage is that we have to beware of the most evident strains of our characters. Often harrowing, sometimes sexily comic, and superlatively acted, the film may be talky but it always makes me want to carve out the time to binge-watch the entire series.

Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

Artists' reputations often take a severe hit as time passes: No one thinks Walter Scott was as great a novelist or poet as his contemporaries did; today, he's read only by specialists, and then often grudgingly. So it's not surprising to find people who think that the directors who revolutionized filmmaking in the 1950s and '60s, like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa, are mannered and overrated. Some of Bergman's early films, I think, are: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) is better in its Stephen Sondheim musicalized version; Wild Strawberries (1957) is a meditation on aging by someone who hasn't aged; The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960) strive for a mythic quality that the material and the medium won't bear. But in his later career, after he had ceased to be the darling of the "art houses," he made some intensely personal films that have the warmth and humanity that he could only feint at in the early ones. Critics tend to prefer his films about women, Persona (1966) and Cries & Whispers (1972), but I find him most genuine in his exploration of childhood, especially his elegant reworking of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1975), which sees the opera through childlike eyes, and Fanny and Alexander, which works with a kind of double-vision: We know what's going on in the various sexual combinations and permutations of the Ekdahl family and their lovers, but we also have the point of view of Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and especially Alexander (Bertil Guve) to elevate them from the merely physical and sometimes sordid into the realm of mystery. If seen from the point of view of the children, this is a kind of ghost story. Alexander will carry into adulthood the experience of seeing two ghosts: one benign, his real father (Allan Edwall), and one malign, his stepfather (Jan Malmsjö). It is also a fable about two kinds of imagination: the artistic and the religious. And we know which side Bergman comes down upon rather heavily.