A Season in Hell

(2 of 2)

Divorce time comes like a fifth season in hell. Fury is king. In one scene, Johan slaps and pummels Marianne till her nose sluices blood. Yet their fiercest encounters act as unconscious aphrodisiacs leading to sudden fervid couplings. Several years pass. Johan gets married again, but not to the student. So does Marianne. They meet. The old libidinous magic still works. They head for a clandestine weekend in a country cottage, free at last, or so Bergman would have us believe, to breathe the oxygen of joy that marriage to each other had throttled.

An hourglass motif is visible in the Johan-Marianne relationship. The sands of power, all his at the film's beginning, are all hers at the end. Women's libbers will probably applaud, but Bergman is less concerned with the inequality of the sexes than with the inequity of the cosmos. He seems to see the love of men and women as a metaphysical surrogate for the absence of God and God's love. It is clearly an incommensurable task. But who could better symbolize the desperate gallantry of the venture than Liv Ullmann, the orchid of the snows? >T.E. Kalem