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Rating: Ten minutes before watching "From the Life of the Marionettes"
What should I watch tonight? Something by Bergman will do… maybe "Thirst"… no, that one has subtitles, it gives me a headache. Already seen "The Seventh Seal"... "From the Life of the Marionettes"! Let’s see: direction, subject, and screenplay by Ingmar Bergman, the third-to-last film of the Swedish director, specifically 1980, German production and actors... okay, no point in reading the names since I don’t know them anyway. Let's go with this one.
Twenty minutes after watching "From the Life of the Marionettes"
In the end, I've found it. I've completed the list of my ten favorite movies. But am I really sure about this?... I mean, am I just speaking this way due to a momentary enthusiasm? Better to recap… so... the film consists of a prologue and an epilogue between which are ten chapters preceded by captions that collect a series of sequences held together by a logical, not chronological, order (A book or a theatrical work?). In the prologue, a prostitute is murdered by the protagonist, Peter Egermann, and throughout the work, through the division into "chapters," we discover the journey that led the man to the murder. What happens twenty hours after the catastrophe? What happened fourteen hours before? And a week later? The characters involved are essentially three: the wife Katarina Egermann, the mother Cordelia Egermann, the psychiatrist Morgan Jensen, and Katarina's collaborator Tim. The latter is the cause of it all: he reveals to the investigator that he loved Tim and pushed him towards a prostitute to distance him from his wife and bring him closer to him.
Five minutes after starting to write this review
Well done, you managed to reduce a masterpiece to a simple little story. Are you so stupid as to consider a film one of your favorites because of the story? Go watch a kids’ show instead.... I mean, are you capable of bringing out the reasons why film criticism often says a lot of nonsense? Yes, the criticism... the one that dared to state "Bergman's throne begins to falter" or "Enhances the dramatic aspect and penalizes introspection".... wow!...
Three-quarters of an hour after watching "From the Life of the Marionettes"
The feature film concludes the director's German period. In fact, the light tones and tender disenchantment of a "Wild Strawberries" have completely disappeared, making room for a much colder and detached analysis of the human soul, a thesis confirmed by the psychiatrist's medical report placed at the end. The stark traits of the film are accentuated by the black and white (the film is in color only in the prologue), the sharp use of light which sharply defines the characters as during the scene in the psychiatrist's office, sometimes alienating, pushed to the extreme, as in the dreamlike narrative of Peter's dream where the protagonist and Katarina seem like two aneroids in a neutral and sterile space. The settings contribute to evoking that crudeness mentioned above: the decadent house of mother Cordelia, the squalor of the brothel, the vulgar sadness of the prostitutes.... However, it would be unfair to deny this film the adjective "Bergmanesque": the theme of marital problems often recurs, and perfect and splendid dialogues are set according to the needs of a dispute between contrasting points of view.
Forty-six minutes after watching "From the Life of the Marionettes"
Peter is a rich man, satisfied professionally and sentimentally. Like an investigator, Bergman traces the motivations for a crime committed by a rich man, satisfied on the professional level and fulfilled on the sentimental one. But in this case, it’s not the usual anti-bourgeois rant, which, let’s admit, was already outdated in the '80s, and then Peter can't exactly be defined as bourgeois: he calmly talks about his sexual bond with his wife and is happy to have created an open couple with her. But then what is wrong? The rationalization of everything: the interests, the ways of communicating, love itself, as if everything were part of an eternal show where mistakes cannot be made. In the dream Peter recounts, he and his wife appear in languid attitudes followed by moments of seemingly senseless violence. Both are victims of a cycle that goes beyond the simple daily routine, they are actors of their own life from which the protagonist unconsciously tries to escape through destruction, the macabre, like a company of puppets, or better said marionettes, among which one has gone mad.
Ten minutes after starting to write this review
However, it would be unfair not to consider the figure of Tim, Katarina’s homosexual collaborator. Regardless of being the protagonist of one of the most intense monologues in the history of cinema (Katarina asleep and him sitting close only to his image reflected in the mirror), in the end, Tim almost reveals himself as the responsible one, in a broad sense, for the prostitute's murder and unveils the essential content of the film: the dangerous irreconcilability between individual needs and the compromises of love, the resulting loneliness, the withering of the spirit.
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