Love in relationships (spoilers)

There are *** spoilers below *** for this film and The Cranes are Flying (1957).

Imagine trying to decipher this complicated, secret language that two lovers develop and talk uninhibited.

I think this was Sondersby's line and it seems to be the major theme of the film; the secret language of lovers in a relationship. A language that can be captured in music but not by sight. Many of the reviews mention their dislike of Stig and indeed he is not an especially sympathetic character, who we, the audience, know little about to help 'explain' or 'understand' him. But it seems unfair to demonise him within his relationship and marriage to Marta. We as an audience see and hear what occurs between them, yet we are outside the language of love (which includes pain and hatred) that envelops the two. From the outside in, Stig is not intelligible to us as he is to Marta. Or vice versa.

Unlike her he seems to have been ambitious and with a desire to be an artist of repute. She seems more content to be part of an orchestra and later part of a marriage. He struggles to have and retain a separate identity throughout the film. This becomes increasingly difficult with the arrival of two children in his marriage with Marta. The reality hits home that he might never be the man he dreamt of becoming and he expresses this by having an affair with a woman, herself married, who admires him from afar whilst Marta loves him very near. There is a grubbiness in Stig's affair, as implied by the behaviour of cuckolded husband and lecherous, voyeuristic tenant, that is absent from his marriage to Marta. In the marriage there is a clarity and crispness of something pure in feeling, even if that feeling is antagonistic.

The film felt full of tension and pathos and I felt for both of them in their difficulties. The dialogue between them was great; at once melancholic but with a subtle invective that served to wound each other more. The cruelest moment occurred after Marta criticised Stig who slapped her around the face. She takes responsibility for her actions but says she will never forgive Stig, whose momentary violence gives way to remorse only to realise with pain that he will not be forgiven and his wife is filled with contempt for him. Is this not a classic moment in relationships: when one feels the everlasting pain they have either caused or nursed in their relationship and the residue with which it coats everything that follows? Moments like this during the film made me sit up and pay attention to the truth of a reality unfolding in the film.

Yet in spite of all this there was beauty and majesty in the relationship of Stig and Marta, and in the music, that I was reminded of the love story of Boris and Veronika in The Cranes are Flying. It helped that the actresses who played Marta and Veronika were dark-haired and dark-eyed as seen in the many close-ups of their faces. The character of Stig was no Boris by any means but the love and joy, when it was just there without sorrow or recriminations, was similar in both cinematic relationships. And of course both films end with a character mourning the death of the other. Each bereaved partner has an emblematic toy of the now-dead loved one: For Stig it was the bear he gave Marta as his first present; for Veronika it is the squirrel Boris left her when he departed for war. Stig and Veronika reaching across mourning to a joy that is present beyond laughter or happiness; Sonderby's closing words.

For Stig that joy is present in playing music for his son. For Veronika it is celebrating the end of war and the return of many who survived to be reunited with family and loved ones. In each case their love of another has given them something, a type of joy, that cannot be eradicated by death. Both Stig and Marta embrace that joy by surrendering. In The Cranes are Flying Veronika's joy is shown in beautiful black and white photograph with shots that pan up and down as she gives away her flowers. In To Joy Stig's joy is played to the music of Beethoven performed by the orchestra, of which he is and Marta was, a part.

My second favourite Bergman film (after Wild Strawberries) of the handful I've seen thus far. 9/10

Keep silent unless what you are going to say is more important than silence.