Scenes from a Marriage (Season 1)

Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap, 1973) is Ingmar Bergman's Swedish miniseries, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Johan and Marianne have been married for years and strike everyone as the model couple. Then Johan announces he is leaving her for another woman.

The confession knocks the ground out from under Marianne. She bargains, she clings, she tries to understand, but the crack has already opened and the divorce will not be stopped. Bergman builds the whole thing out of six long conversations — no score, almost no sets, just two faces in close-up and words that cut deeper than any blow. Liv Ullmann is Marianne, Erland Josephson is Johan, and the series rests entirely on the two of them.

What makes it strange and great is that the divorce is not the ending. It is the start of a raw new intimacy between two damaged people who never quite let each other go. Bergman later cut this television cycle into a separate 1974 feature. The work is often called the most honest thing cinema has ever said about marriage; Swedish divorce rates reportedly rose after it aired. If you are ready for a merciless, very adult conversation about love, start here. Stream every episode of Scenes from a Marriage online on iFILM.