From the Life of Marionettes

Director: Ingmar Bergman

29 July 2024

See

Peter (Robert Atzorn) a businessman in Munich murders a prostitute. A series of scenes with his wife Katarina (Christine Buchegger), his mother, Cordelia. His friend Tim, and therapist Professor Mogens Jensen.

Think

I first came across this TV movie reading the Taschen book The Ingmar Bergman Archives. I learned about it as the backstory of two of the characters that appeared as friends of the couple in the first episode of Scenes from a Marriage. That is a complex study of a relationship through its ups and down, being together and separate. But this is a macabre parallel of it could always be worse.

Feel

The opening an closing scenes are in colour,  and the the aftermath and events proceeding are examined in black and white.

“I think we are all manipulated, more or less, and From the Life of the Marionettes is about the manipulation of human beings by forces outside and beyond them–forces you cannot control, and you cannot define.”

 In Peter Cowie “Ingmar Bergman: the Struggle with ‘The Beyond’” The New York Times (1980).

The catastrophe is the making is full of nuance, frustratingly so. Yet that thematically is what give this a theatre production quality, as well the actors and director having worked together at the Residenztheater where Bergman directed plays when not making films in Sweden. Nothing is so stark in its rightness or wrongness except the crime itself. Everyone’s perspective is flawed. Peter and Katarina know each other so well and yet should they be together, or can they be apart?

Peter’s mother Cordelia makes it all about her, and she is big part of his character development, as is apparently the absence of his father and Cordelia being controlling. It’s the complete opposite of Judy Davis’ portrayal of an unexpressive mother feeling responsible in Nitram. Peter’s repressed bisexuality is examined, but that affects the impartiality of Tim not having an agenda, as he’s the gay friend waiting in the wings for Peter to come to him. Professor Jensen is biased too as he’s having an affair with Katarina. Examining the sum total we can begin to comprehend why Peter did it. Except he didn’t . Peter isn’t real. Bergman made him up. Why exactly? To create. The ultimate resolution is Peter’s institutionalisation, like the solace the director took from his own hospitalisation for a prosaic crime of tax avoidance.

“Peter lives in a similar existence. He sleeps with his worn teddy bear from childhood. He plays chess with a computer. For half an hour every morning, he stands quietly smoothing his bed. His wife, Katarina, still lives with him, but now they are distant. She tells her mother-in-law that she leads her life as usual. ”But at the time I’m crying inside.” “ Bergman said.