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"I feel contempt for myself," Johan (Erland Josephson) admits when ex-wife Marianne (Liv Ullmann) asks why he feels such contempt for his son Henrik (Bšrje Ahlstedt), and that explains why no one seems to have grown up much in Ingmar Bergman’s 30-years-later follow-up to his 1973 Scenes from a Marriage. On an impulse, Marianne goes to visit Johan, whom she hasn’t seen in years, at his summer house and gets embroiled in his relationship with Henrik and Henrik’s daughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius). Josephson and Ullmann are as edifying as ever here, but humiliated-son-turns-humiliating-father is an unedifying scenario that Bergman has been trying, and failing, to break out of for at least 50 years, and it gets no help here from everyone’s awed admiration of Henrik’s late wife, Anna, whom we see only in a photo. The sight — and sound — of Johan with his head between the speakers listening to the brutal Scherzo from Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony tells you all you need to know. | Swedish | 111m
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