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 its effect reached well beyond the cinema: divorce rates reportedly rose in Scandinavia in its wake.

Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson play Marianne and Johan, a couple whose seemingly settled marriage Bergman takes apart over years of conversation and rupture. Sven Nykvist shot almost all of it in unsparing close-up, and the film drops plot and spectacle to concentrate on two faces and the shifting weather between them; the domestic talk grips like any thriller. Ullmann in particular gives one of the great 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. Film-makers from Woody Allen to Noah Baumbach and Richard Linklater have claimed it, and it spawned an acclaimed 2021 HBO remake. Bergman returned to the couple three decades later in his final film, Saraband. It is intimate and exhausting, and honest to the point of pain, and for us Scenes from a Marriage is the definitive screen anatomy of a relationship. Countless couples have recognised themselves in it, with a shudder.