Scenes from a Marriage
9.2 /10 1 Votes9.2
4/4 Roger Ebert Country Sweden | 8.5/10 IMDb 94% Rotten Tomatoes Genre Drama Duration | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Release date 11 April 1973 (1973-04-11) Film series Scenes from a Marriage film series Cast (Marianne), (Johan), (Katarina), Jan Malmsjö (Peter), (Eva), (Modern)Similar movies Interstellar , Lymelife , Kiss The Bride , Sex Tape , No Escape , Wedding Daze | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann) are married and seem to have it all. Their happiness, however, is a facade for a troubled relationship, which becomes even rockier when Johan admits that hes having an affair. Before long, the spouses separate and move towards finalizing their divorce, but they make attempts at reconciling. Even as they pursue other relationships, Johan and Marianne realize that they have a significant bond, but also many issues that hinder that connection.
Contents
Scenes from a Marriage (Swedish: Scener ur ett aktenskap) is a 1973 Swedish TV series written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. The story explores the disintegration of a marriage between Marianne, a lawyer, and Johan, a professor (played respectively by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson) over a long period, using a restricted cast, a naturalist, hyper-realistic cinematic style, claustrophobic close-ups, and strings of rapid, articulate monologues. After major success in Sweden, the series became notorious worldwide when it was condemned for allegedly inspiring a spike in Scandinavian divorce rates, which almost doubled in the year of its release.
Ten years of Marianne and Johan's relationship are presented. We first meet them ten years into their marriage. He is a college professor, she a divorce lawyer. They say that they are happily married - unlike their friends Katarina and Peter who openly fight, especially when under the influence of alcohol - but there is a certain detached aloofness in the way they treat each other. In the next ten years, as they contemplate or embark upon divorce and/or known extramarital affairs, they come to differing understandings at each phase of their relationship of what they truly mean to each other. Regardless of if it's love or hate - between which there is a fine line - they also come to certain understandings of how they can best relate to each other, whether that be as husband and wife, friends, lovers or none of the above.
Episodes
This plot summary is for the 281-minute TV miniseries version of the work (the feature film retains the episode names as chapter titles). Each episode concludes with long, quiet, comforting shots of Faro landscapes, as a "relief" from the up-close, tense and claustrophobic episodes. Each episode is structured around one critical scene, described below, with the rest of the episode dedicated to discussion and aftereffects. Some of the episodes occur months or years apart.
Cast
Production
The TV version of Scenes from a Marriage is almost five hours long, split into six episodes. In the United States, a 167-minute version was released in cinemas. The film was made on a $150,000 budget and was shot mostly in Faro, Gotlands lan, Sweden.
Reception
The film won several accolades, including BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Liv Ullmann (Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama), and a Best Foreign Language Film.
A sequel, Saraband, was released theatrically in 2003. In 2008, a theatrical adaption by Joanna Murray-Smith was performed at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Imogen Stubbs and Iain Glen.
In popular culture
Dallas and Knots Landing creator David Jacobs based the latter series on Scenes from a Marriage. It focused on four married couples whose marriages were in various stages: the newlyweds, the ideal couple, the couple whose marriage was in trouble, and the couple that had recently reconciled. The series ran from 1979 to 1993.
In the 1984 SCTV skit/commercial parody "Scenes from an Idiots Marriage", Martin Short plays Jerry Lewis playing a writer who goes through a comedic version of Scenes from a Marriage, complete with pratfalls and constant mistakes in Swedish pronunciation (he constantly calls Sven Gunderblum "Sy Worthenson" when his wife (Andrea Martin) announces that she is divorcing him and gives him Gunderblums name as her lawyer).
In 1991, Woody Allen co-starred in Paul Mazurskys Scenes from a Mall, a dark comedy about a deteriorating marriage. Allens similarly realist film Husbands and Wives (1992) includes several nods to Scenes from a Marriage, including a wife who will not show her poetry to her husband.
In an April 2011 New York Times Opinionator article titled "Too Much Relationship Verite", Virginia Heffernan compares An American Family to Scenes from a Marriage:
It’s now the future. And the 12-hour PBS time capsule, which will make a rare reappearance next week at the Paley Center in Manhattan and on some public-TV affiliates beginning Saturday, looks more like performance art than social science. Hammy stunts for the camera alternate with Bergman-esque staging. ("Scenes from a Marriage", Bergman’s fictional TV series, also appeared in 1973, in Sweden.)
In June 2013, actor Ethan Hawke and director Richard Linklater said Scenes from a Marriage was the bar against which Before Midnight must be set.
References
Scenes from a Marriage WikipediaScenes from a Marriage IMDbScenes from a Marriage Roger EbertScenes from a Marriage Rotten TomatoesScenes from a Marriage themoviedb.org