Word: johans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Marriage begins airily enough. Wedded for ten years, Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann) have been selected by some national publication as a kind of "ideal couple" for a feature story on successful marriages. The superficially earnest lady interviewer asks the usual questions, some of them posed as answers. Johan is 42 and a behavioral scientist. Marianne is 32 and a divorce lawyer. They have a lovely home, two lovely daughters, lovely meshing temperaments. Fill in all the blanks with lovely...
Celebrating at a dinner party with another ideal couple, their friends Katerina (Bibi Andersson) and Peter (Jan Malmsjo), Johan and Marianne have to face something rather unlovely. Beginning with taunting asides and barbed revelations (sexual and otherwise), Katerina and Peter erupt into one of those verbal cockfights designed to draw the other spouse's blood in front of mixed company. Johan and Marianne are embarrassed to silence, but what has really been stilled and wounded is their purring complacency in their own bliss...
...pick flaws in each other, to break out into raspy little headachy tiffs. Yet everything seems contained. The we-ness of the marriage web is tenacious even when its strands are mundane realities like dental appointments, plumbing repairs and dinner every Sunday with the in-laws. Then one day Johan tells Marianne that he has fallen in love with a young student in his university seminar and is leaving to be with her. All the blood seems to drain out of Marianne's body. Ullmann even manages to make her lambent sapphire-blue eyes turn pale. In the Mediterranean...
Divorce time comes like a fifth season in hell. Fury is king. In one scene, Johan slaps and pummels Marianne till her nose sluices blood. Yet their 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...
...JOHAN HANSELER...