Word: bergmans
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Screenplay and Direction by INGMAR BERGMAN...
...wars are cruel, but civil wars are the cruelest. A marriage in which love has turned to hate becomes a civil war. In this film, it is Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman's basic contention that something in the institution of marriage curdles love and ferments hate. It is possible to deny the premise, but the picture defies refutation. This is a work of magnetic force, searing intelligence and an oppressive melancholy lightened by flashes of erotic ecstasy...
...film. In content, it is a child of the stage, most obviously Strindberg's Dance of Death, Ibsen's A Doll's House and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? More unsettlingly, its form has been imposed by the demands of TV. Bergman wrote and filmed it as six 50-minute segments for Scandinavian television. Telescoping the series in length to just under three hours blurs some of the narrative line, and Bergman's unrelenting reliance on talking heads will give some filmgoers visual and auditory claustrophobia...
...fiercest encounters act as unconscious aphrodisiacs leading to sudden fervid couplings. Several years pass. Johan gets married again, but not to the student. So does Marianne. They meet. The old libidinous magic still works. They head for a clandestine weekend in a country cottage, free at last, or so Bergman would have us believe, to breathe the oxygen of joy that marriage to each other had throttled...
...hourglass motif is visible in the Johan-Marianne relationship. The sands of power, all his at the film's beginning, are all hers at the end. Women's libbers will probably applaud, but Bergman is less concerned with the inequality of the sexes than with the inequity of the cosmos. He seems to see the love of men and women as a metaphysical surrogate for the absence of God and God's love. It is clearly an incommensurable task. But who could better symbolize the desperate gallantry of the venture than Liv Ullmann, the orchid...