The title of this Ingmar Bergman movie is, of course, mordant. It’s also a reference to the Beethoven musical piece, which is played at various points in the movie, because the main protagonists are musicians in an orchestra who end up in a relationship.

But who also start in a relationship: As the movie opens, we see the male lead being told that “Marta” is dead in a kerosene stove explosion. We don’t know who Marta is yet, but from context it seems like she’s probably his wife, and then… flashback to years earlier, when he meets her in the orchestra.

So we see how their relationship begins, and we know how it ends, and the movie is telling the story of what happens in between, which it does well. Both characters are portrayed with depth and nuance and complexity. If there’s a fault here, it’s that he’s honestly kind of a medium shitbag; you can see why she’s with him, but she could probably do better.

Or maybe not; it is, after all, Sweden in the late 1940s, and perhaps the pool of marriageable men was just not that high-quality at the time. I’ve remarked before that it’s hard to understand the extra-filmic social context of the past, and that’s something I really felt here — because there’s a number of scenes where various couples are engaging in extramarital trysts in a way where everyone knows about it, and like: Are these free-love bohemians (they are, after all, musicians or in that circle), is this just how normie Swedes were at the time, or are they supposed to be viewed as deviant/sinister to people in that time and place?

I don’t know! And it kind of matters, because the male protagonist ends up having an affair with this other man’s wife (Wikipedia refers to them as “swingers,” but that feels extremely anachronistic and not quite accurate), and arguably the core of the movie is the impact that this has on the main characters’ relationship, and how they handle it — maybe this movie is a paean to traditionalism against cosmopolitan mores, or maybe it’s just about this one guy needing to focus on what matters to him, idk.

Either way, though, my verdict is that this is the strongest yet of Bergman’s early movies (by which I mean: it’s stronger than Crisis or A Ship to India). Perhaps unsurprisingly, as this boxed set steps through his early movies, they begin to feel more and more characteristically like Bergman movies. He’s obviously not yet at the full flower of his powers, but you can see his interests and style becoming more and more apparent. This maybe isn’t a great movie yet, but it’s a very good one.