The movie opens with a brilliant scene where Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) are being interviewed by an elegant journalist straight out of some Swedish version of Cosmopolitan. Her cliché questions are answered mainly by Johan with cliché answers. A dinner with another couple follows. The visiting couple abuse each other in elegant, sadistic, low key Bergmanesque put-downs that would make Martha and George blush. The visitors laud Marianne and Johan as the perfect couple, which telegraphs the director's intentions.
Sure enough, in an hour or so we learn that the Marianne/Johan couple is in the process of dissolution, ostensibly due to Johan's latest unfaithfulness but actually the result of multiple deep seated grievances towards each other. The process is put in motion in pretentiously titled episodes, and for the test of the movie (almost two hours) we are witnesses to disagreeable conversations between the couple. Ullmann is required to emote endlessly in extreme close-up while Josephson delivers his lines with an irritating, sarcastic self-assurance combined with bursts of self-pitying, whining and fits of violence. I grew tired of both actors after a while, but it's not their fault; they are portraying disagreeable manipulative characters self centered to the point of navel-gazing and devoid of even a vestige of sense of humor or sense of family; the two daughters of the couple appear shortly during the initial dinner, are put to bed and heard of no more. They are only mentioned from time to time by Marianne to blame Johan for forgetting their birthdays.
The end has echoes of previous Bergman movies, in particular Gycklarnas Afton (1953), where couples reach some kind of understanding, security and appreciation of each other through mutual betrayal and humiliation, a process that Johan characterizes as a "textbook on life." Depends on your definition of life.
Sure enough, in an hour or so we learn that the Marianne/Johan couple is in the process of dissolution, ostensibly due to Johan's latest unfaithfulness but actually the result of multiple deep seated grievances towards each other. The process is put in motion in pretentiously titled episodes, and for the test of the movie (almost two hours) we are witnesses to disagreeable conversations between the couple. Ullmann is required to emote endlessly in extreme close-up while Josephson delivers his lines with an irritating, sarcastic self-assurance combined with bursts of self-pitying, whining and fits of violence. I grew tired of both actors after a while, but it's not their fault; they are portraying disagreeable manipulative characters self centered to the point of navel-gazing and devoid of even a vestige of sense of humor or sense of family; the two daughters of the couple appear shortly during the initial dinner, are put to bed and heard of no more. They are only mentioned from time to time by Marianne to blame Johan for forgetting their birthdays.
The end has echoes of previous Bergman movies, in particular Gycklarnas Afton (1953), where couples reach some kind of understanding, security and appreciation of each other through mutual betrayal and humiliation, a process that Johan characterizes as a "textbook on life." Depends on your definition of life.