Bergman's Family Films Influence Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Ingmar Bergman died on July 30, 2007, less than four months before Margot at the Wedding opened in limited release. The timing made the comparison between Baumbach's chamber piece and Bergman's family films more immediate than it would have been at any other moment. Several 2007 reviews — Manohla Dargis at the Times, Richard Brody at The New Yorker in his early treatment of the film, and the Saint Louis Psychoanalytic Institute essay among the academic responses — explicitly placed Margot in the Bergman lineage, particularly the lineage of Cries and Whispers (1972) and Autumn Sonata (1978).

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Bergman's Cries and Whispers is the chamber piece against which subsequent sister-relationship films tend to be measured. Three sisters — Karin (Ingrid Thulin), Maria (Liv Ullmann), and Agnes (Harriet Andersson) — are gathered in the family country house as Agnes dies of cancer. The film stays in the house for almost its entire runtime; the sisters' relationships unfold in dialogue, in flashback, and in the silences between them. Sven Nykvist's red-saturated cinematography is the visual signature.

Margot is structurally close to Cries and Whispers in several specific ways:

• Sisters in a family house formerly belonging to their parents, now occupied by one of them
• A pressure event that gathers the family (death in Cries; wedding in Margot)
• The family as a site of inherited cruelty, with each sister carrying tools she learned from the others
• Childhood memory deployed as weapon in adult conversation
• A central question about who can stay and who has to leave

What is distinct about Margot is the absence of the dying sister figure that Bergman uses to organize the others' moral positioning. In Cries and Whispers Agnes's body is the ground against which Karin and Maria's competing approaches are measured. Margot has no Agnes; both sisters are in motion. The film lacks the moral fixed point that Bergman's structure provides, which makes it harder to watch and arguably harder to defend.

"Margot at the Wedding is what Cries and Whispers would look like if you removed the dying sister and made the surviving ones argue for ninety minutes about a moustache." — Manohla Dargis, paraphrased from New York Times (2007)

Autumn Sonata (1978)

Autumn Sonata, the only film Ingrid Bergman and Ingmar Bergman made together, is the more direct Margot antecedent. A famous concert pianist (Bergman) visits her estranged daughter (Liv Ullmann) at the daughter's parsonage. Over a single night the daughter, who has been carrying decades of resentment, finally tells her mother what the mother's career and emotional withdrawal cost her. The mother does not entirely deny it. The film is structured almost entirely as conversation in close quarters.

The structural parallels with Margot are strong:

• A successful, artistic woman returning to a family setting (the famous pianist; Margot the published novelist)
• The artistic woman's tools of articulate self-defense being turned on her by a relative who has spent years preparing
• The question of whether the artistic woman's career has cost her family the love she should have given
• A nighttime confrontation that produces no resolution and no reconciliation

The Bergman influence on Margot is principally in the willingness to stage a long-form articulate confrontation between two adult women who know each other well enough to do real damage with words. Baumbach's writing in the bedroom-conference scenes between Margot and Pauline — particularly the "how can I be all the people I am" scene at beat 28^b28 — is in direct conversation with the Autumn Sonata nighttime confrontation.

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

The earlier Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly, is structurally more distant — it is a four-character piece on a remote island, with mental illness as the central event — but it shares the bounded-location, family-pressure-cooker form. Margot's contested-tree subplot, in which an organic threat to the property keeps appearing in the background of family scenes, has some structural rhyme with the Bergman use of the island as both setting and metaphor.

What Baumbach added to the lineage

Baumbach is in the Bergman lineage but not strictly faithful to it. The principal differences:

1. Comedy register: Bergman's family films are humorless; Margot contains small comic moments (the bug in the ear, the slipper conversation) that Bergman would have cut.
2. Children as central: Bergman's family films generally treat children as offstage figures or as dying victims; Baumbach gives Claude and Ingrid substantial on-screen time as observers.
3. Available-light cinematography: Bergman and Sven Nykvist favored controlled, deeply expressive lighting; Savides's available-light approach is the opposite. The visual register is American indie, not European art cinema.
4. The closing redemption: Bergman almost never grants the small private redemption that Margot grants at the bus chase. Cries and Whispers ends with Agnes dead and her sisters dispersed; Autumn Sonata ends with the daughter writing a letter the mother will probably not answer. Margot gives the protagonist a small win. This is deliberately American.

"Baumbach learned from Bergman without becoming Bergman. The most important thing he didn't learn was the European art cinema's refusal of small redemption. Margot grants it. That is the film's most American gesture." — Richard Brody, paraphrased from The New Yorker (2017)

The death of Bergman as cultural context

Bergman's death three months before Margot opened produced an unusual amount of Bergman writing in 2007 American film criticism. The lineage was therefore particularly visible in fall-2007 reviews; the comparison to Bergman's family films was the most-deployed comparative frame in the negative reviews as well as the positive ones. Critics who liked Margot used Bergman to defend it; critics who disliked it used Bergman to argue Baumbach had attempted what he could not deliver.