Word: johans
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ENDING A MARRIAGE makes people reborn--but only in a tenuous way, Ingmar Bergman seems to say in his movie made for Swedish TV. At the end of the movie, years after their divorce, Bergman's characters Marianne and Johan have each remarried and smoothed out their lives enough to have a new affair with each other. Marianne, originally a paradox-woman whose ability as a divorce lawyer and counselor can't hide her personal inability to see the inconsistencies in herself and her marriage, has emerged from the trauma that surrounded her life from the time Johan left...
...trouble is, she thinks she has her freedom, but she's deceiving herself again, as surely as when, seven years before, at the start of the movie, she thought her marriage with Johan was going smoothly because "we talk everything over and we understand each other instantly"--right before Johan came home one night to say he was in love with another woman and would Marianne please get him up in time in the morning so he could go off with Paula and maybe never come back...
Marianne's romantic illusions hinge on her idea of straight talk. In her marriage at the start of the film, she thinks it comes from fidelity: commitment breeds honesty. But when Johan ups and goes it's clear any commitment there was had bred nothing. For her affair by the new rules with her ex-husband, at the end of the film, she has a new line: "telling the truth now...because we make no demands." Her myth is that if only people didn't talk in a babel of lies they would love in a smooth, enduring...
...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...
...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...