If marriage in its ideal form is a state of grace, in real life it can all too easily embody Jean-Paul Sartre's dictum: "Hell is other people." Ingmar Bergman's superb Scenes From a Marriage (1973) explores the full range of emotions that a couple experiences over a ten year period. Outside of Scandinavia, Scenes from a Marriage (1973) has been known mainly as a 169-minute theatrical feature created for foreign distribution. The new 3-disc Criterion Collection edition gives us the opportunity both to discover the original six-part, five-hour television series and to revisit the familiar theatrical version.

The story is episodic and has long temporal gaps between the individual installments, or "scenes," as Bergman calls them. When we first meet Marianne and Johann, they have been married for ten years. Johann (Erland Josephson) is a bit smug and narcissistic, and Marianne (Liv Ullmann) seems too willing to mold her identity into what she thinks is expected of her, but the two have succeeded in maintaining a stable and apparently satisfying home life. Gradually, fault lines surface in their relationship; Marianne becomes pregnant and after Johann's cool reaction, agrees to have an abortion. Johann, we soon learn, is having an affair. Then comes his announcement to Marianne that he has decided to leave her for another woman. In a series of intimately filmed encounters, we see them fighting, coming to terms with the fact of their separation, maturing as individuals over time and, finally, achieving reconciliation on new terms.

Scenes From a Marriage was written in the spring of 1972, just before the release of Cries and Whispers (1972) and after the failure of recent films such as the English-language production The Touch (1971). Starting to lose confidence in his own abilities and badly in need of a hit, Bergman decided to shift gears and create a project for Swedish television. Written in the spring of 1972, the series was shot rapidly (about a week per episode) in 16mm and on a limited budget. At a 1981 seminar at Southern Methodist University, Bergman said about the project: "When I made Scenes From a Marriage, I saw it together with my wife for the first time. I had cut it into a rough cut, and we saw it together, and we were sitting there six hours! Then I said, 'Good heavens, this is too private! Nobody will understand it!' I had a feeling that no one would accept it."

However, when the series was broadcast in April 1973, it became by far the greatest domestic success of Bergman's career to date, reaching a mass audience in a way that his more esoteric feature films had never done before. After the first episode, the streets in Sweden were literally emptied in the evenings while viewers followed the latest developments in Marianne and Johann's relationship. The series is even said to have caused a spike in the divorce rate and the in the number of couples seeking marriage counseling. Shorn of two hours and blown up to 35mm for worldwide theatrical distribution, Scenes From a Marriage also became the most widely-seen of his feature films to date. When it opened in the U.S. in September 1974, it received mixed reviews but it ran for several months and eventually grossed over 3.1 million dollars. In 1977, the television series was finally shown in its entirety on PBS, with introductions by Liv Ullmann reading from her book Changes.

Scenes From a Marriage is above all an actors' film. All the peripheral roles such as Peter (Jan Malmsjo), Katrina (Bibi Andersson) and Marianne's mother (Wenche Foss) are excellent, but it is primarily a vehicle for Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann. The intimacy the two achieve on screen is utterly convincing, at times to a painful degree. The film's tight close-ups capture the most fleeting changes in their facial expressions, giving the film a psychological acuity rarely seen in the cinema. Perhaps the standout element is Liv Ullmann's performance in Scene Three ("Paula"), where we observe her evolution from an initial inability to recognize the finality of her husband's decision to leave her, to her desperate attempts to keep him and finally, to her devastation when she learns that her close friends were aware of the affair all along.

While the theatrical version is certainly a viable film in its own right, the original television series is preferable since it fleshes out the characters in greater detail and has more of a generous, open feel. In the theatrical version, for example, the subplot of Marianne's pregnancy and abortion in the first episode is removed altogether, as is her lengthy conversation with her mother in the last episode. As Peter Cowie rightly points out in a 15-minute video essay describing the differences between the versions, in the television series Marianne is also given more space to develop her own identity over time. A less essential, perhaps, but charming feature of the television series is the close of each episode, in which Bergman himself reads the credits over a view of the island of Faro.

Ultimately, in the theatrical version the couple's relationship has more of an abstracted quality--a Relationship with a capital "R" as opposed to a relationship grounded in lived experience. Also, the transition between episodes can seem jarring, especially that between Scene Three, which closes with Marianne's utter devastation at the breakup, and Scene Four ("The Vale of Tears"), when the two meet again for a fling. Here the television series clearly works better on a dramatic level, since the narrative time elapsed between the episodes is mirrored by the real time of the viewer's life that has elapsed between broadcasts. Some critics have dismissed Scenes From a Marriage as soap opera, but it is soap opera of a sublime variety. It is surely among the most intelligent and emotionally rewarding projects ever conceived for television.

The Criterion Collection's DVD set is an elegantly designed package. The television series is spread over two discs and a third disc contains the theatrical version. The extras include Cowie's aforementioned comparison between the two versions, typically insightful interviews by Bergman and the two leads Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, and an essay by film critic Phillip Lopate. Criterion's transfer, based on a 2002 Swedish restoration and transfer to high-definition video, has rich color and preserves the necessary film-like quality. Viewers may initially be put off by the amount of grain in the image, but one should keep in mind that the film was shot in 16mm and most likely with fast film stock, which would further increase the grain in the image. The graininess soon becomes an indelible part of the film's aesthetic, somehow adding to the sense of intimacy we feel while observing the characters. For fans of Ingmar Bergman's work, this set is an essential purchase. For those not already familiar with the director, this compellingly acted and accessible work makes an ideal introduction.

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by James Steffen