PARTISAN REVIEW
583
hero would have to renounce love, calling taking preeminence, to save
himself and us all. Polanski's hero is doomed to be the occasion of
destruction-the events of
Chinatown
are fatalistically determined---of what–
ever woman he falls in love with and tries to save, which is another version of
the same romance. Like
Lancelot of the Lake, Chinatown,
within a different
mythology, heralds the death of knighthood, the end ofa mythic nobler time.
It is a film that gets more beautiful on reseeing.
Chinatown
is full of moment to
moment pleasures that are obscured on first viewing by the manipulations of
the narrative.
2
One of the many attractions of Ingmar Bergman's pared down televi–
sion drama,
Scenes from a Marriage,
is how close to the edge of sentimental–
ity it plays without ever going wholly wrong. What interests me about the
new Bergman is not its realism, though it pretends to a psychological
realism and has been talked about in those terms, but its dreamlike
quality-the film's real subject the unadmitted fantasy life of a marriage.
Johan and Marianne (Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman) are unable to
sustain their comfortable middle class marriage without the romantic occa–
sion of crisis. Comfort and security in Bergman's desolate universe is a
stultifying self-deception.
The first of the film's six scenes is, in part, an interview with the couple
by a woman's magazine interested in presenting formulations of successful
marriages. Johan is stiffly ironic with the interviewer, Marianne earnest
and embarrassed. Both protest modestly the perfection of their marriage,
which includes comfort, affection, security, compatibility, good relation–
ships with children and parents, and an absence of crisis. This "perfect"
marriage, one quickly discovers, is held together by the avoidance of con–
flict, by a long history of unadmitted deceits.
The film is made up of a series of reversals. Johan , who had presented
himself as the more content of the two (Marianne had confessed to some
restless feelings), announces one day that he has fallen in love with another
woman and is going off with her. (The other woman never appears in the
film nor do the couple's children, making their reality shadowy and unim–
portant.) Crisis makes Johan and Marianne tender to one another, opens
up long denied resources of affection, revives love. It is as if to keep their
passion for each other alive, to keep themselves alive, that Johan and
Marianne have to give up living together.
And so it goes. They meet from time to time to talk of a possible divorce
and to take measure of each other's life. When they meet finally to sign a
