Lena and Johan decide to separate. The two met at a nightclub nearly thirty years ago when she was 24 and he was 19. “It’s hard to imagine life without her,” Johan said then, his face beaming. A year later, they welcomed their first-born, and the world they shared changed. Now they are middle-aged, raising three daughters, coping with cohabitation, and experiencing an apathy that cannot be put into words. As Lena and Johan sit on the sofa in front of the camera, they will ask themselves the same question as the viewer: is the desire to divorce an expression of love?

In 2000, Nycander documented this Swedish couple when they were giddy with love. Returning to her characters at a mature stage in their relationship, she decides to dissect the institution of marriage. By maintaining a relationship over the years and getting just close enough to the couple to unleash a pure openness, the director offers Lena and Johan the space for a form of therapeutic self-reflection. They look back at themselves in order to understand what has really happened between them over the years. This fascinating documentary echoes the director’s compatriot Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973), by asking what it is that separates happiness from unhappiness in intimacy, and vice versa.