Would YOU do it? ***SPOILERS***

After he's lied to her, manipulated her, and humiliated her by pretending to be married to keep her at a distance? I'd say they're pretty well-matched--but I wouldn't want to be in a relationship either of them!

But then, this isn't a real relationship, is it? It's a lovely, shiny fantasy about two impossibly pretty people in a glamorous dream world where everyone is rich, sophisticated, and clever and endings are always happy--that world where movies like this were always set. I can suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it on that basis, without approving of the characters' behavior if it was in real life!

I find it funny that you put it on her when he is the one who is married.

"I think that I wouldn't give her (or anyone else, for that matters...) a second chance"

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Well that speaks volumes about you then, doesn't it?

Being willing to give someone another chance can be a moderate and mature thing to do, assuming the issues have been put on the table and hashed over. Intransigence is a much more unattractive trait than any of those you've accused Bergman's character of possessing.

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I thought the way she acted was just fine. I think making a person jealous to get them to wake up and make a move if the relationship is stalled is fair play. The main thing in all of this is she loves him and vis versa.

“love may make the world go round but revenge is the axle on which its spins”





The only Abnormality is the incapacity to love

He's the one who pretended to be married and unable to divorce so he could have a relationship with her without marriage. she is actually taking a risk by having an affair with him - such a relationship could still be damaging to a woman's reputation in those days. Don't forget that Bergman's real life affair with a married man had damaged her career some years earlier. It is understandable that she is annoyed when she finds out he has been pretending, hencer her indignant cry "How dare he make love to me and not be a married man!"

I don't have any issue with what she did and think he was overreacting. She had found out that he regularly went around claiming to be married so that he could have his nice no-strings-attached relationships without the women inevitably thinking that they'll change him and expecting marriage once they get far enough along. That's actually pretty clever of him because this way the women going into it know he's not going to marry then and don't hold out hope for it, even if he's lying about why because it's just that he has no intention of getting married.

At the end, he's all "Oh, come on. You knew I'd marry you eventually." Well, clearly not. Because she thought he was married. It's like he's blaming her for not assuming he liked her so much he'd actually marry her when he said nothing of the sort and his annoyance with women doing that is why he invented a fake wife anyway.

It's just more sympathetic (especially back then when courting often ended in marriage) for him to refuse to marry someone he's in a serious relationship with because he can't and they both have to try and make the best of a bad situation than if he were absolutely free to marry her but just didn't want to and thought she'd be so desperate for marriage that he lied to her about it because he knew he'd have no interest in marrying her.