From the Life of the Marionettes (Ingmar Bergman, 1980)

 

From the Life of the Marionettes is one of Ingmar Bergman’s most chilling films, infiltrated with a loathing and pessimism that feel all-consuming: it was made during Bergman’s German exile from Sweden, a period of great acknowledged personal difficulty, in which the film feels helplessly suffused. It certainly feels like a deliberate stifling of any lightness we might detect in his work, with for example a protagonist called Egerman harking back to Smiles of a Summer Night (and with another famous actress prominent in the structure), except that the smiles here are heavy with malice and/or calculation, and the “little night music” becomes a deadening disco-inflected grind; the film’s cheerless interiors generally preclude any sense of day or night or any other index of the natural world. It starts with Egerman’s murder of a prostitute, then goes back in dossier-like fashion to place the event in a kind of context: we learn early on that he was plagued by fantasies of killing his wife Katarina, with the doctor in whom he confides these thoughts promptly summoning Katarina to his office, and then making sexual moves on her (which seemingly come close to succeeding); almost every subsequent scene provides a further moral or ethical or behavioral transgression or atrocity or mark of trauma. It perhaps follows that Egerman can gain a measure of control over his deadeningly repetitive, joyless life only by embracing the extremity of depravity, placing himself beyond the pale; the murder and his subsequent life in prison, removed from any knowledge of what’s going on outside, are the film’s only sections in colour, contrasting with the forcefully drab black and white of everything else. The film is highly artificial, its single-mindedness sometimes verging on parody; it causes you to worry for the state of mind of its maker (or would do, if not for one’s knowledge that Bergman’s next work was Fanny and Alexander), and for your own.