Word: johan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Solee said that the loss of Johan Akerman, last year's top Engineer foil man, hurt his team badly. Akerman, the 1974 Intercollegiate Fencing Association foil champ, was drafted into the Swedish army last summer...
...Johan (Erland Josephson) is a somewhat less carefully developed example of this reactionary rarely-think conformism. He runs with no warning to Paris with his young girlfriend. In the affair with ex-wife Marianne at the end, she's embarrassed by the memories their old bed evokes. He snickeringly calls a friend to borrow his cottage for "a rather delicate matter--she's very pretty, let me tell you." Yet he thinks he's changed, grown away from his excess aspirations, learned when to lie and when to be candid with his lovers...
...petty, inchoate sexual relations of a sexually and politically unequal society. Bergman has never isolated these passions before. For the past two decades the characters in his movies have been searching for something beyond middle-class love--thus the brooding solemnity of so many of them--but Marianne and Johan can envision nothing more. Scenes From A Marriage is closer to more of life for more of us, so its little nips of recognition are more frequent and less profound than in Bergman's other movies: thus the frequent claim, already made by both critics and promoters, that...
...most on end about ourselves. A look at the published screenplay makes it harder to see why this should be. The book's dialogue is filled with petty details that never add up to reasons to act, terrors are pointed out in the stage directions, but except when Johan first leaves Marianne the passions are too strong for what's happening. The screenplay seems just good enough to make small, slippery claims on the audience's emotion; of course, it does much more. Partly, this happens because of the unusual rapport between Bergman and his actors, particularly Liv Ullman...
ENDING OUR MARRIAGES makes us reborn, Bergman seems to say, and he may be edging near the truth. The marriage he shows came from a social base where everything worked against it, and the new lives of the reawakened partners seem no more fulfilling. But if Marianne and Johan have even a slightly better idea of what went wrong, they may pass on that little bit of wisdom--speeding the apocalyptic day when love won't conquer anyone but will make peace with all, in an age of sense and reason and sexual equality. But it's not even clear...