"Married Life," which Bergman shot in 1973, was originally split into multiple episodes to air on television, but has now been cut together into a nearly three-hour movie. Because each scene is shot in the form of an indoor drama, the dialogue plays an important role, not only to express the characters' thoughts and conflicts between them, but also to shape the background of the story and reveal the process of the characters' psychological changes. Only a few people actually appear in the film, but there are many characters in the dialogue, including their family members, friends, colleagues, doctors, lovers and their later life partners. The dialogue is sharp and refined, and once you put it in for three hours, it will pass before you know it.
It is composed of two episodes and six main scenes forming a chamber drama with a counterpoint structure. Counterpoint exists almost everywhere in this film. The main law of counterpoint is reversal, character reversal, plot reversal, the story rolls from the front of the characters and the scene to the back of it, and most of the details are reversed. Around this bizarre "marriage planet" turned several times. The main thing is the big cycle experienced by the hero and heroine: the hero changes from a friendly and motivated good gentleman to a hypocritical and selfish betrayer, then into a decadent middle-aged man, and finally into a whistling happy Teenager; and the heroine changed from a naive housewife to a warrior who fought tenaciously with reality, to a shrewd and powerful single mother, and finally back to a naive girl.
The film implicitly addresses the issue of a person growing up in love and marriage. The two protagonists in this story, after their divorce, steal their love again and become two children, with a mentality as light as the first love of the boy and girl. When the hero calls a friend and says he is with an eighteen-year-old blonde girl, the heroine is moved to tears when she sees the hero whistle while waiting on the fireplace. It seems that only people who become innocent again can enjoy the purity of love again.
Maybe growing up is not a problem for love, but a wedding is a coming-of-age ceremony for some people, especially for young people who get married in their early twenties. In marriage, the first is a set of ethical rules of the family that makes things serious and solemn, and the second is that after the child is born, people become real adults - parents.
Personal growth is an important theme for marriage, and refusal to grow or false growth will make family life vulnerable and enter into a dire situation at any time. When it comes to Johan and Marianne, the two protagonists in this movie, Johan is a false upbringing of dealing with official duties. He avoids a lot of things and is afraid of being honest, and he either rejects outright or pretends to be deaf to anything that disturbs his state of mind. So on the surface, he seems to be firmly in control of reality, always posing a solemn and reliable posture with a pipe in his hand, but in fact it is all fake and pretentious. Marianne refused to grow up. She relied on Johann's advice for almost everything, and used sex to control him, so that he had to compromise. These are the reasons for their marriage to be unsustainable. During their separation, Marianne began to grow up, and Johann began to refuse to grow up. As a result, in the scene where the divorce was signed, Johann became a down-to-earth uncle, while Marianne became a shrewd and capable person.
The story of the movie is quite bizarre. It is actually a mirror image of a popular story. A originally happy couple eventually turns into an cheating man and woman, which is just the opposite of those cheating men and women in popular dramas who eventually become real couples. And the story has a fairy tale feel to it. Although there are many plots in which the hero and heroine hurt each other (betrayal, verbal attacks, personal fights), the whole story is like a fairy tale, because there is a lot of comforting power in the theme and plot of the story, which comes from Bergman A painstaking search for the human heart. Like a master of classical drama, he describes the source of all kinds of human suffering as profoundly as possible. To describe them is to dig them, and to dig them is to clear them, even temporarily. The eradication of the mentally ill is also a part of the existence of novels, plays and poems. It is not enough to simply describe the appearance of pain. It is necessary to dig out its roots neatly and cleanly. Great novels and plays have this effect.
The two couples in this film, Johan and Marianne, and Pete and Catalina, all experience the pain of their married life, which is buried deep in their hearts, and their respective personality flaws "dependency, lack of self-confidence, avoidance, Blind faith and selfishness "both make people suffer. Because these things will lead people into a cruel and unmanageable reality. Marriage is all these things put together on a piece of paper, and a person enters into a marriage, and his or her above-mentioned personality flaws can be covered up by the seamless schedule that rolls in. If a person can adapt to the tedious repetition of marriage and family, and fulfill his obligations and responsibilities step by step, day after day, year after year, then this layer of paper will be strong enough, and his life will not change. Confused and lost in nothingness. The happiness of married life can be sweet and illusory, and its stability depends on the characters of the two people. Marriage is just a layer of paper. Most of the paper is not strong enough. As long as a thorn appears in a person's heart, or a flower sticks out from the outside, it will be pierced, and then the vulnerability of the human heart who was just covered up hastily will be revealed. Come out and get exposed to the sun, and if you choose to escape, you may be down on it.
The married life of Johan and Marianne is a paper-based happiness. The interview with their husband and wife at the beginning of the film is very interesting. When I watched it for the first time, I thought it was an ordinary TV interview. It was boring, but the second time I watched it You'll look more closely at what they say, especially Johan's self-description (competent, athletic, perfect lover) and Marianne's description of him (confident, dull), because all of these are reflected in the film Sended. When Marianne described herself, she said that compassion is the most important thing. She believes that if people pay attention to the people around them from childhood, the world will be better, but in the movie, she happens to be kept in the dark. Johann cheated for several years, and they All the friends around know that she is the only one who doesn't know anything, and Johann is still the closest person to her. Johann said she had always been like this, unaware of the facts.
The lack of awareness of the facts is the source of Marianne's pain. Because of the lack of awareness, she cannot recognize Johann's true attitude towards married life. On the other hand, she took the trouble and involved him in every detail. There are several times in the film where Johann's boredom is consciously captured, until Johann confronts her — at the dinner table admitting to her that he's having an affair and running away from home — and she gradually realizes that she's having an affair. The problem was that the episode before the scene of her awakening thunder had already started.
The episode about Marianne was a divorce case she took on. This is a strange divorce case. An old woman wanted a divorce after her children were married and independent, and she waited fifteen years for this decision. Fifteen years ago, she told her husband that she couldn't live with him because there was no love between them, but her husband asked her to wait until the children grew up before getting a divorce, because his husband was a kind person and she agreed. She said that the absence of love caused her feelings - hearing, sight, touch gradually disappeared, such as the table in front of her, she could touch, but it felt far and dry, and everything became faint and pale... Her words made Mary Ann was shocked, but she still hadn't touched the false skin of her married happiness.
The episode before Marianne was an episode of Johann's so-called self-confidence, where he wrote some poems and showed them to one of his female classmates, and she just very euphemistically said they were a little mediocre, and his self-confidence was violent Shaking, speaking out of order, exposed a sensitive and fragile soul.
These two episodes can be seen as a wonderful foreshadowing of the story, and can also be seen as a profound exploration of the human state of mind. Love and confidence, these are the two most important pillars of the human soul, each lack of which will make one's destiny uncontrollable. The lack of love makes Marianne unaware of the world around her, and therefore unaware of Johan's inner emptiness. And the lack of self-confidence Qiaohan will reap the consequences of his own, and only after the breakup admits that he never thought that he had such a strong dependence on Marianne.
There are some excellent dialogues in the movie, such as Johann confessing his feelings about married life to Marianne, this one is very candid.
JOHAN: I'm interested in ending it all, guess what I can't stand the most, chattering about what we're going to do, what we're going to think about, what would your mom think? What will the children think? How are we going to prepare the dinner party, shouldn't we invite my father over? We have to go to the beach, go hiking, go to St Moritz. We gotta celebrate Christmas, Easter, birthdays, whatever, over and over again!
Marianne: Poor baby...
Johan: I don't want your sympathy!
...
JOHAN: These words are just empty talk, I never want to touch the real us, I don't even think there is such a thing as real, no matter what we say or do, it can cause harm.
Later, when they signed their divorce, there was a dialogue that echoed the above. At this time, Johan and Marianne had been separated for more than two years, and now they began to re-describe their marriage from their own perspectives. At this time, they both became more candid , knowing that it will cause harm, but also touching the truth.
Marianne: It seems very insensitive to say this when you are so embarrassed, but it's also strange enough that I don't really care. The rift appeared in our love, and if I didn't let myself be held back by guilt, I would have known that we were all wrong, but remember when Karin was born, our sex life became almost impossible? We both blamed it on my two pregnancies and we made up a lot of excuses to explain the unpleasant sex life when the alarm bells were ringing for us, but we didn't listen!
Qiaohan: It doesn't make any sense to be an afterthought.
MARYANNE (shouting her head): Your stupid sarcasm is driving me crazy! What right do you have to control my thoughts and feelings?
JOHAN (very calm): God, I hate you, and I used to feel that way, God, I hate you, especially when we make love, and I feel you are indifferent, and when we make love, I see When you're sitting in the tub naked and cleaning the dirty stuff I've shot in your body, I'm thinking, I hate your body, hate your every move, I should hate you to the core , I really want to smash the indifference and resistance that emanate from you, but we have opened up other topics to talk about our love of fish and water, and get along harmoniously...
This quarrel was followed by a scuffle, and Marianne, who was beaten with a nosebleed, was relieved, and the beater Johannes came to experience the true taste of a middle-aged man's decline and loss.
The marriage of another couple, Pete and Catalina, that appears at the beginning of the film is the real purgatory, the hatred between them cannot be hidden, they live a cooperative life, and they both hate each other but can't. Separation, because separation means going through a bloodbath over the division of property, and it will seriously devalue everything they own.
They are all young children, and they live in their own fantasy worlds. Because unlike children who usually live together in a family life with adults to guide and mediate, the two of them together are like a pair of outcasts who hate each other. "What's scarier than a couple who hate each other?" Strindberg said . They stunned the audience by attacking each other with the worst possible language.
To say that this movie is like a fairy tale means that Johan and Marianne got along again after going through this storm and enjoyed their heartfelt love again.
There's no way that Pete and Catalina's marriage could have had such a happy ending. In Bergman's other film "Puppet Life", Pete ends up in a mental hospital, enjoying him comfortably in a silent world. loneliness and tranquility. Their marriage was not a paper lantern but a shackle of steel.
After the show aired on TV, Bergman became a marriage expert, and received numerous letters from viewers inquiring about their marriage, which Bergman found amusing because Johann ran away from home. That scene copied his own life. But he married five times in his life, and one of them was perfect enough to be called an expert. He was a person who was afraid of death, but after his wife died before him, he said death became less scary.
Bergman's idol was his great compatriot Strindberg, who also spoke about the horror of death, saying that death is terrible because people all know nothing about it.
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