Ingmar Bergman's sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, after an unprecedented interval of thirty years, emerges not just as a relative trifle, but also as a less than legitimate sequel. Constructed in ten distinct acts, or chapters, plus a prologue and epilogue (Scenes from a Divorce, if you please), it is no longer about a marriage, nor is it even predominantly about the two former marrieds. Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) have not communicated with one another in the three decades since the conclusion of the earlier film, until Marianne, musing over a jumble of old snapshots, takes it into her head to get back in touch, to pay a visit. She is now sixty-three ("and they've taken away my ovaries and uterus"), and he, like Bergman himself, is eighty-six. But Marianne will function as little more than a witness to the main order of business, a power struggle between the now wealthy and retired Johan and his down-and-out widower son (by another woman) over the schooling of the latter's daughter, a gifted cellist whose instruction has heretofore been left to her incestuously possessive father, not averse, in true Bergmanly fashion, to expressing his feelings through hitting. (Bergman, you might recall, has been titillated by the idea of a female cellist as far back as his unfunny comedy, All These Women, titillated, to be blunt about it, by the idea of a female cellist needing to spread open her legs.) The direct address to the camera in the prologue, to be repeated in the epilogue, makes for an inauspicious start, a bit lazy, a bit lubberly. And the ensuing ten acts, or chapters, or scenes, look a bit like a soap-operatic TV play, an impression possibly heightened by the shooting in digital video. (Et tu, Ingmar?) It's quite shocking how fast the old fatigue comes back to you, how quickly you tire of people talking to each other as people talk nowhere but in a Bergman film: "There's a healthy dose of hatred in your general mushiness," and so on. If the effect had not taken hold so fast, it might have been merely disappointing instead of shocking. One scene, a very late scene, gives a taste of what we would have expected from a satisfactory sequel: when Johan comes into Marianne's bedroom in the grip of the night sweats (at the Hour of the Wolf, if you know your Bergman), and crawls into her bed to seek comfort from his glimpse of the abyss. For the rest, it's hard not to hear a broader implication when Marianne sizes up her visit, "This was a mistake." Börje Ahlstedt, Julia Dufvenius. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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