Quartile rating: 8.5/10 · 1 rating
Johan and Marianne are married and seem to have it all. Their happiness, however, is a façade for a troubled relationship, which becomes even rockier when Johan admits that he's having an affair. Before long, the spouses separate and move towards finalizing their divorce, but they make attempts at reconciling. Even as they pursue other relationships, Johan and Marianne realize that they have a significant bond, but also many issues that hinder that connection.
Bergman's intimate six-hour excavation of a marriage dissolving in real time is one of cinema's most unflinching portraits of human relationships. The plot is essentially a chamber piece — two people talking, arguing, weeping, and occasionally rediscovering each other — yet it achieves extraordinary emotional density. Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson deliver career-defining performances of staggering naturalism, making every moment feel painfully observed rather than performed. Sven Nykvist's cinematography is characteristically luminous with its close-up face work, but the deliberately confined, functional visual grammar serves the material rather than dazzling on its own terms. Novelty is very high: no film before or since has dissected marital collapse with this level of sustained, almost clinical honesty across such an extended, episodic structure. The ending — returning to the couple years later, still entangled despite everything — is emotionally resonant and thematically coherent, though it lands with quiet ambiguity rather than a truly decisive punctuation, keeping it from the highest mark.