Thursday, August 16, 2012

From the Life of the Marionettes (1980)

Associated Film Distribution
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(YouTube)

Ingmar Bergman's clinical dissection of a dysfunctional marriage which leads to murder was made for German TV. The unhappy couple are alcoholics, pill poppers, have an "open sexual relationship" with multiple partners... and they wonder why their marriage is failing? All of this is revealed and rehashed in depth by their psychiatrist. The husband loses it one night while visiting a prostitute and strangles her in the opening prolog, shot in color, while the rest of the film is in black and white, until the epilog which is also in color. There is a trademark Bergman dream sequence with the nude couple in a white room with no doors or windows. The film is laced with nudity, sex and explicit language, despite being a TV movie. In the end, I felt nothing for the characters: immoral and living solely for their own pleasure. Perhaps that was Bergman's intent, but it sure wasn't much fun to watch.

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