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�I never want to marry. I just want to get divorced.� � Natasha, Love and Death (1975)
I have just finished watching the first two episodes of Ingmar Bergman�s six-part 1973 miniseries, Scenes from a Marriage. I could have watched the movie version instead, but I generally don�t approve of abridgements, except in extreme cases.(The Mahabharata, the diaries of Samuel Pepys�neither of which have I read, yet, by the way, but these are the examples that first leap to mind).
Now, back to Scenes from a Marriage. Here is the premise: Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson, may he rest in peace) are an upper-middle-class couple who seem to have the perfect marriage. They have a nice house, two daughters, economic stability (she is a family law lawyer�which is not something that I can generally picture Liv Ullmann doing, but whatever�and he is a professor of �psychotechnology� or �technopsychology,� I don�t recall which) and the movie opens with them being interviewed about their wonderful marriage for a women�s magazine. Now, if their marriage was actually flawless, we wouldn�t have a movie here, let alone a miniseries (just as Juno, had it been more explicitly pro-choice, would have been twenty minutes long and probably not as funny), and so these first two episodes introduce, bit by bit, elements of discord and signs of discontent into their marriage.
But I don�t want to talk plot details now; instead I want to talk about Liv Ullmann�s face. Liv Ullmann�s face is one of the most expressive faces I�ve ever seen, and it�s not surprising that Bergman feels content to plant his camera in front of her face and just linger there as a scene unfolds. If you stare at it long enough, it almost becomes abstracted, and you�re not looking at a face anymore, but rather a composition of shapes and colors and textures. Liv Ullmann has very delicate lips and a light band of freckles across her nose and beneath her eyes. She is very pale and Norwegian-y (Ullmann is originally from Norway, although she is most well known for her work in the Swedish cinema; the Swedish film scholar Stig Bjorkman did a book of interviews with Woody Allen called Woody Allen on Woody Allen, in which Bjorkman explains that, to a native Swedish-speaker, Ullmann�s Norwegian accent is detectable. While I was watching these episodes tonight, I was on the look-out for it, but it eluded me). Ullmann has very distinctive features, and that could be a euphemistic way of saying that she�s not attractive, but that�s not the case. Liv Ullmann is very attractive. She has, however, the capacity to look unattractive, to look run down and �frumpy� (a word I detest), as was observed by Rick Moody in his Criterion Collection essay on Scenes from a Marriage. This variability in her presentation is a testament to the aesthetic and emotional elasticity of her face. Which I suppose might be a weird thing to praise someone for, under most circumstances, but for an actor it�s wonderful. There are few actors with faces so engrossing that the simple pleasure of looking at them can justify the whole film that�s built around them. Examples that come to mind: Jean-Paul Belmondo, who similarly hovers on the border between being ruggedly handsome and dog-facedly ugly (if we�re being frank); he always struck me as bearing a resemblance to Ringo Starr. Then there�s Tony Leung Chiu Wai, who is unambiguously handsome; have you seen the man�s eyes? Few people can be simultaneously as cool and as intense and Tony Leung. Feel free to take a moment to do an image search for �Tony Leung eyes.�
And who could forget that other Bergman regular, Max von Sydow, the long-faced, vaguely equine Swede with sad, world-weary eyes oozing with the pathos of being, not just a human being, but an exemplary Bergmanian Swede, with all the existential and emotional baggage that comes with it?
And as long as we�re on the subject of actors with captivating eyes, the award for greatest eyes in the world goes to Gael Garcia Bernal. With my pretensions and general film snobbery, I consider myself to be an �auterist,� and generally won�t see a movie just because of the actors in it, but I�ve made exceptions for Garcia Bernal. I saw Carlos Cuaron�s dimwitted Rudo y Cursi because it had Garcia Bernal in it (it also had Diego Luna, but I don�t really get the appeal of him). I even saw Fernando Meirelles�s truly execrable Blindness (along with maybe four other people in the US) because it had Garcia Bernal in a supporting role. Jesus, there�s ten dollars pissed away irrevocably.
But anyway, having discussed the face of Liv Ullmann, I also want to talk about the colors on view in Scenes from a Marriage. The movie has two main color schemes, which I will define roughly as �nauseatingly 70�s-style earth tones� and �hospitalesque, antiseptic whites.� Now, despite the fact that I just called them nauseating, these earth tones that we find in Marianne�s and Johan�s living room and kitchen can look quite warm and quite lovely, especially with the elegant compositions with which cinematographer Sven Nykvist shoots them. They�re reminiscent of the bold primary colors on display in a lot of Godard�s mid-60�s movies, which strike one at first as garish and ostentatious but take on a surprising beauty in the way that they�re composed. (Or perhaps everything just looks better on film; the borders of the shot constitute a frame and it�s like looking at a painting; it�s been placed in an aesthetic context and has thusly been aestheticized.)
The hospital whites are lovely too. Sure, they�d probably be cold to live in, but I�ve always had a weakness for them, especially in the cinema. They look clean and all the naked geometric angles of the architecture stand forth in sharp relief. I especially loved the hospital scenes in Apichatpong Weerasethakul�s Syndromes and a Century; for me, they are the ideal model of what a cold, antiseptic hospital corridor should look like (again, this is a question of hospital aesthetics; if I was actually a resident at that hospital, I�m sure I would react quite differently, and certainly the whites hospital interiors I�ve seen in movies set in mental institutions have always struck me as sinister).
Marianne�s and Jan�s bedroom is as a white as white can be; any whiter, and it would be like the room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I suppose the coldness of their bedroom conveys the lack of emotional and sexual heat between them.
So, I�ll probably keep you posted on my experience watching Scenes from a Marriage. If I end up not having too much to say about this movie, I can always talk about other Bergman-related subjects dear to my heart. So far, Scenes from a Marriagehas made a very good impression on me. I think it does an excellent job of showing how basically good people can destroy each other just as well as demented, broken, or downright evil people.
Post-script: I got a bitch of a paper-cut opening up my Netflix envelope. Should I sue? If so, for how much?
Second post-script: Without commentary, here is a list of actors who I really should have included in my exploration of "actors who are fun to look at." It would be an injustice not to acknowledge them:
Toshiro Mifune
Tatsuya Nakadai
Anna Karina
Anne Wiazemsky
Song Kang-ho
Marcello Mastroianni
Tadanobu Asano
In�s Efron
Ok, now you can carry on.
Second post-script: Without commentary, here is a list of actors who I really should have included in my exploration of "actors who are fun to look at." It would be an injustice not to acknowledge them:
Toshiro Mifune
Tatsuya Nakadai
Anna Karina
Anne Wiazemsky
Song Kang-ho
Marcello Mastroianni
Tadanobu Asano
In�s Efron
Ok, now you can carry on.
