When her mother died, Karen met a foreign man, David, and became good friends, and it turned out that David had fallen in love with Karen on the day they met.
Karen is a housewife with a successful husband, two lovely children, and a seemingly happy family of 4. But she still cheated.
The film depicts a family of four in bright and Swedish language, while the extramarital affair is dark and speaks English. The lover David has black hair, which is different from the blonde hair of a family of 4. The director uses symbolic elements to show the two completely different worlds of marriage and love. Karen takes care of his own home, but at the same time he throws himself into the arms of other men. Again and again cheating contact, accompanied by ** and adventure.
The husband is rich, but his personality is boring, and his lover has no money, but his heart is unrestrained. On the one hand, Cullen plays the role of a virtuous wife in a respectful marriage, and on the other hand, she plays the role of a bitter lover in cheating. The two-sided nature of the characters' hearts occupies most of the film and is expressed naturally.
Bergman uses a warm and vivid Scandinavian lens language, and the silent and solemn landscape seems to tell the complex and melancholy inner world of the heroine Karen. This is in stark contrast to her husband's boring and timid personality, and the depressed and irritable heart of her lover David. A woman is naturally mysterious and good at disguise, she has the right to pursue freedom and happiness through contact with strangers, but she does not have the courage and strength to break through the shackles of marriage and achieve complete freedom and happiness.
Similar to the plot of "The English Patient" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover", the film is basically a "middle-class woman's boredom and adventure" structure, the story structure and dialogue content are classical, the tired family part is presented in Swedish, and the adventurous infidelity part is presented in English. The performance is decent. **Full of obscurity and lyricism**. Mellow artistic expression has the charm to conquer the audience, giving this simple and banal story a poignant and touching dreamlike color.
Karen switches between two roles, wife and lover, and she can't leave either one behind. It is inseparable from the nest of warm and rich materials, and it is impossible to give up the spiritual bitterness of charming infatuation. She wants to juggle between two men, and her duplicity embodies the middle-class dependence on material life and the boredom of spiritual life.
In addition to contact, touch also has the meaning of emotion. Cullen and David's inner emotions from the beginning are actually a long and real process, and the film vividly portrays this process full of happiness and pain, but no matter how deep the emotion is, Cullen will not abandon her role as a wife and mother. The thirst for love and the shackles of marriage are the shackles of humanity presented by the director in this film.