CAN’T WE GO HOME ANYMORE?: Ingmar Bergman and Noah Baumbach
“We can propose childhood as an “ideal” provided that it is not by default but par excellence, not because we are incapable of becoming adults but because on the contrary we have realized all the possibilities of that state.” Odile, Raymond Queneau (1937)
In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy begins by declaring that “All happy families resemble each other; but every unhappy family has a special reason to feel unhappy.”
The first scene of the television series Scenes from a Marriage directed and written by Bergman (which was later packaged as a film for the US market) is titled “Innocence and Panic”. This title could also fit the scene, which in my opinion, encloses the mess of Marriage Story in which Charlie the male lead in a bar after facing a painful and exhausting divorce process painfully sings Being Alive by Stephen Sondheim “You are no longer a boy, you’ll never be a boy again,” declares Charlie.
On this, it is also notable to pay attention to the final scenes of each film: On the one hand, Bergman reunites his characters alone in a house after years of being legally separated. They sleep together and Liv Ullman wakes up hastily in the night after a nightmare and demands comfort and protection from her ex-husband, while a sincere and warm hug takes place, the sound of a ship that probably has just leave. In A Marriage Story, the final sequence is no less disturbing: Charlie holds his sleeping son in his arms and walks to his car after saying goodbye to Nicole, his ex-wife, she notices that his shoes are untied, like a mother: figure of protection and defense stops it and ties them up.
These final moments are aptly contrasted with their beginnings: Scenes from a Marriage opens with Marianne and Johan in a magazine interview, commenting positively on family life and marriage. Nicole and Charlie in Marriage Story make two written statements about the most redeeming aspects of each other and their relationship, complemented by a moving visual montage of their marriage. It doesn’t take long for both films to drop the veil and we discover that we are witnessing a limbo between the spectacular shipwreck and the autopsy of a marriage.
In Charlie’s speech about Nicole she mentions “She knows how to play, she really plays and it’s never too much” or “She knows how to listen carefully”, among others, all seem to be characteristics of a nine-year-old girl. Both films address a series of questions about the cracked world we call adulthood. The relationships of the two couples represent a dark space in which love seems to fall into an infertile space and love is sacrificed for the vulgarity of a normal life, which requires the loss of innocence and daily agony. Nicole separates from her husband, because she has been forbidden and unable to play, to be an infant, to explore the still-living parts that she keeps within herself. Marianne also states in an honest assessment of her life in Scenes from a Marriage: “To my surprise, I have to admit that I don’t know who I am.” Johan, in it, after an argument with his wife while they are divorcing, says “We are emotional illiterate.”
The children, in films that deal with divorces, normally function as the object and ultimate trigger of the objectives of the two main characters who will be the parents and although in Marriage Story it fulfills this obligation to the letter, I dare to say that Underlying this, the son has a much more important role in the narrative of the story and that is to embody the lost innocence and give us a starting point to understand these two human beings, two children locked in an aging body. Henry, son of Charlie and Nicole, has issues with learning to read from him throughout the film, the culminating moment in which he can successfully read with his father, reads the loving statements with which the film opens. This not only represents a school or academic triumph, it transcends and allows a cure for what Bergman called in his film “Emotional illiteracy” and a structural repair of relationships.
The legal dispute in which Nicole and Charlie live is plausible as the impetus for the narrative arc of each character, although at times I found myself disoriented in the constant administrative formality that translates into emotional trampling, but I prefer to avoid the discussion of the film gets stranded in those waters.
Both directors inject their works with realism and aim to create an environment so bare that the characters dance between absurd humor and absolute melancholy. However, Marriage Story seems to run out of realism and a layer of fantasy sits on top of the story, like cream on milk. The man (Charlie) in an anomalous way, is the one who is drowned in a world of women and not the other way around. Adam Driver carries a huge histrionic challenge on his back throughout the film, he never falls short despite the painful sequence of the discussion where the greatest psychic bloodshed of the entire film takes place and unfortunately, it feels scripted and choreographed, for Therefore, your chances of successfully exploiting the tension vanish.
Both films go through a total ignorance of who each of the members of the marriage are and the nature of their relationship, it is in this space without heroes or villains where the closest lifesaver but the one that is ultimately never chosen is to go to the source of reconciliation and going home: the house of innocence, a kind and safe shelter that we all have asleep somewhere in our memory; In that place, it is likely that we can find that missing body that Noah Baumbach talks about at the wake of a divorce. The place where you can overcome the ultimate shame and reconquer human simplicity.
I deduced from Jack Gilbert’s beautiful poem Failing and Flying:
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. but anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
…the end of something forces you to think about its beginning; Baumbach begins his film with that obligation, but that principle precedes marriage, precedes any experience related to the object of suffering itself, goes back to the ignorance of suffering, to the purity of intentions, to a kind of noble spirit that has not yet been corrupted and that upon returning to it, reconstructs the trace of its own existence.