From the Life of the Marionettes (1980)

From the Life of the Marionettes (German: Aus dem Leben der Marionetten) is a 1980 film directed by Ingmar Bergman. The film was produced in West Germany with a German language screenplay and soundtrack while Bergman was in "tax exile" from his native Sweden. It is filmed in black and white apart from two colour sequences at the beginning and end of the movie. It is set in Munich. The title is a quotation excerpted from a passage in The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi:


"Most unfortunately in the lives of the Marionettes there is always a BUT that spoils everything".
Unlike Collodi's story, however, Bergman's is unremittingly bleak in tone.

The film charts the disintegration of the relationship of Katarina and Peter Egermann, the feuding couple seen briefly in Bergman's earlier Scenes From a Marriage. As Katarina seeks other lovers, the emotionally repressed and despondent Peter descends into neuroses, eventually leading him to tearfully murder a prostitute (played by Rita Russek), with the same name as his wife, at a Munich peep show before sodomising her dead body. In the closing sequence he is incarcerated in a mental asylum. An odd counterpoint to the depressing tone of the film is the sprightly disco soundtrack over the end credits.

Synopsis

Enfermé dans une maison close, un client tue la prostituée avec laquelle il devait passer la nuit. Le film reconstitue par fragments les jours qui précèdent et suivent ce crime, afin d'essayer d'en comprendre la raison.

Actors