Scenes from a Marriage

Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (1973) began as a six-part series for Swedish television, watched by millions, before Bergman re-edited it into the theatrical film that carried it around the world. It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and swept the American critics' prizes, and it had a measurable real-world effect — divorce rates reportedly rose in Scandinavia in its wake.

Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson play Marianne and Johan, the couple whose seemingly settled marriage Bergman dissects over years of conversation, rupture and reconciliation. Shot by Sven Nykvist almost entirely in unsparing close-up, the film strips away plot and spectacle to concentrate on two faces and the shifting weather between them, finding in domestic talk a drama as gripping as any thriller. Ullmann, in particular, gives one of the towering screen performances of the era, her face a register of every passing feeling.

Its influence on the cinema of marriage and divorce has been vast, claimed by film-makers from Woody Allen to Noah Baumbach and Richard Linklater, and it spawned an acclaimed 2021 HBO remake. Bergman returned to the couple three decades later in his final film, Saraband. Intimate, exhausting and devastatingly honest, Scenes from a Marriage remains the definitive screen anatomy of a relationship — a work that countless couples have recognised, with a shudder, as their own.