“The game”

“The game” is the name Lukas gives to his arrangement with Marianne, a set of rules that lets him dictate her conduct and impose punishment. It begins as a bounded encounter, but its effects reach beyond the studio: Marianne experiences depression, detachment from other people, and diminished control over her own body. When Lukas presents his conduct as love, she refuses that definition, ends the arrangement, and leaves.

The Rules and Their Reach

The arrangement has been in place for several weeks by the time the narrative describes it. During the game, Marianne is not allowed to speak or make eye contact; if she breaks a rule, Lukas punishes her later. The rules also define when the game ends: not when sex is over, but when Marianne is permitted to shower. That extension matters because Lukas retains control after the sexual encounter itself, sometimes delaying the shower while he talks to her.

In those conversations he tells Marianne degrading things about herself. She is conscious of a divide between what she desires to hear and what she does not want to hear, and the gratification she experiences is brief and troubling rather than sustaining. The arrangement thus depends not only on rules for her behavior but on Lukas’s authority to determine when the encounter is finished and what she is made to hear along the way.

Effects on Marianne

Afterward, Marianne experiences a depression so deep that it feels tranquillizing. She eats whatever Lukas tells her to eat and feels she has no more ownership of her body than if it were discarded litter. These consequences show how the game’s control carries into ordinary bodily needs, rather than remaining confined to its stated rules.

Her detachment also appears in the way she perceives other people. Since arriving in Sweden, and particularly since the game began, people have seemed to her like unreal shapes cut from coloured paper. A brief moment of eye contact with a bus conductor or someone asking for change can bring back the fact that she is visible to others and that this is her life. The recognition briefly opens onto ordinary desires—to speak Swedish, swim, or dance—but they quickly fade. In Lund, she is rarely hungry; she fills a plastic Evian bottle each morning and pours most of its water away at night.

The Studio and the Photo Session

The game takes place against the wider imbalance of Marianne and Lukas’s relationship. Lukas’s studio contains his sleeping mattress, tall windows, plants, atlases, and a bicycle wheel; objects that first impressed Marianne later seem staged after he explains that he gathered them for a shoot. His aesthetic discernment is exacting, but Marianne recognizes that sensitivity to artistic failure has not given him a developed sense of right and wrong. The contrast unsettles her, making art itself seem suddenly pointless.

During the photo session, Lukas adjusts a lamp and camera while Marianne removes her sweater and bra at his direction. He then takes a coil of thick black ribbon from a drawer and binds her wrists for photographs. Marianne’s response is marked by exhaustion and withdrawal: she turns away, closes her eyes, and struggles to speak or move. When Lukas reaches for another length of ribbon, she says she does not want to continue. He acknowledges that he knows, but proceeds to bind her further and cover her eyes. The scene makes the arrangement’s central imbalance explicit: her refusal is heard, yet at first does not stop his actions.

Rejection and the End of the Game

Lukas tells Marianne that he loves her and says he knows she loves him. His claim changes the meaning he assigns to the arrangement, but not for Marianne. Horrified, she pulls away, manages to raise the blindfold, and demands that he untie her, threatening to call the police. Lukas begins to loosen the binding; once her arms are free, she removes the blindfold, puts on her sweater, retrieves her bra, and gets her boots on.

Marianne tells Lukas not to speak to her that way again and insists that she feels nothing for him. His response—that all of life is an artistic technique—continues the collision between his artistic self-conception and her demand that he answer for what he has done. He praises her as a gifted writer, but she laughs in horror rather than accepting the compliment as reconciliation. She leaves the apartment and descends the stairs into the falling snow. Her departure marks a decisive break: the arrangement ends not with the shower that ordinarily signals the end of the game, but with Marianne refusing Lukas’s account of their relationship and walking away.

Significance

“The game” turns an announced set of rules into a broader struggle over agency. Its endpoint, the shower, initially makes Lukas’s control appear procedural and contained; the aftermath reveals that its reach includes Marianne’s eating, self-perception, and ability to feel present in her own life. The later photo session brings that imbalance into the open when her verbal refusal fails to halt Lukas at once.

The final exchange exposes a conflict over the meaning of intimacy itself. Lukas describes his behavior through the language of love and art, while Marianne’s response is to reject both his claim on her feelings and his attempt to treat the encounter as technique. Her exit does not erase the earlier effects of the game, but it ends her participation in the rules Lukas has imposed.