Scenes from a Marriage
I finished watching Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. T had left the DVD for me when she went up North and had highly recommended I watch it. It was fantastic. I watched the first half on Saturday and found myself longing to get back to it on Sunday. It was originally a miniseries and Bergman had released it when his popularity was at an all time low, but apparently after the second episode was aired, they said nobody was in the streets because everyone was glued to their television sets.
There are few movies much less television shows that can hold you in their grip like this one. More importantly, it made me melancholy for the art of longevity. My aunt and uncle were in the other day to see my mom and they’ve been together 43 years. They were telling me how being together that long you ride the waves up and down and that in the end you become the people you are and you learn a lot. I told them I almost had that in my marriage to Steve. We were on the precipice of overcoming when as Barbra Streisand sings, “We let the bough break, I let the stranger in, Who’s sorry now.”
But watching Scenes, you realize more than feet of clay, there is also the inevitability of action vs. nonaction. Could Marianne have grown in such large dimensions without Johan’s actions? Most probably not. And therein lies the crux of choices, the school of hard knocks is sometimes your best teacher despite the regret you learn to live with as you make your way towards enlightenment.
September 8th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Hummm. This sounds interesting. We pretty much abandoned TV all summer, the pickings were bad. We started picking up old TV mini-series to watch, beginning with Shogun, and then went thru Centennial, Jewel in the Crown and now we’re into Upstairs Downstairs and that’s about 9 seasons too long to finish this summer. Since the fall season doesn’t look too promising either, I think I’ll add this one to the list.
September 8th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Well worth it Alice – think you will enjoy it. Meanwhile, we’re working our way through Mad Men, just Netflixed the 2nd season. But I was looking in my DVR to see if As Time Goes By was still being aired on BBC, with Judi Dench, a nice series I used to watch weekly.