August 4-10, 2005

movies

last dance: Erland Josephson (left) and Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman's Saraband.

Reunited, and It Feels So Bad

Ingmar Bergman adds a new act to Scenes from a Marriage.

Saraband

by Sam Adams

In their old age, filmmakers commonly settle into a happy rut, producing deliberately minor, if often immensely enjoyable, works for the sheer joy of working. Saraband, Ingmar Bergman's self-proclaimed swan song, is not that kind of movie. Instead of a fond farewell, it's a prolonged howl into the abyss, a typically rigorous and unforgiving work from a long-dormant master.

In truth, Bergman's "retirement" has been somewhat exaggerated: In the last two decades, he's directed more than half a dozen filmed plays for Swedish television and written some of his most personal (or at least autobiographical) scripts, although since Fanny and Alexander the latter have been handed off to trusted friends, including Bille August, Liv Ullmann and his son, Daniel. But if for no other reason than that the intervening works have gone largely unseen in the United States, Saraband has the force of a return.

It's almost shocking to see the words "Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman," and more so that Bergman has revived Johan and Marianne, the characters from his 1973 miniseries Scenes from a Marriage. Scenes, recently released on DVD in its full five-hour version, is Bergman at his most domestic, even melodramatic: The pained faces of Erland Josephson and Ullmann fill the screen in microscopic close-ups, as if the secret to penetrating the soul were puncturing the skin.

Saraband begins in light, airy two-shots, but it isn't long before the camera moves in for the kill. (Five credited cinematographers wielded Hi-def cameras, emulating Sven Nykvist's unsettling zip-zooms.) Set 30-odd years after Scenes, the film is set entirely on Johan's estate and divided into 10 movements, each of which consists of a dialogue between two characters. (There's also a prologue and an epilogue, in which Marianne addresses the camera directly.) The news that Bergman had crafted a sequel to Scenes naturally spawned expectations that he would pick up where the series left off, but in fact much of the movie is dedicated to the troubled relationship between Johan's granddaughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius) and his son Henrik (B°rje Ahlstedt). That Henrik, who is not Marianne's son, is never mentioned in Scenes is an indicator of how little Bergman feels bound by fidelity to the earlier work, as is the fact that he seems to have increased the seven-year difference in Johan and Marianne's ages significantly (Marianne gives her age as 63, while Johan mentions being in his 80s). He has also made Johan, once a frustrated scientist, an independently wealthy recluse, thanks to a bequest from a rich aunt — all of which has the effect of making Johan much closer to the role Josephson played in 2000's Bergman-scripted, Ullmann-directed Faithless, a character not incidentally named Bergman.

Karin and Henrik's relationship is a typically knotty affair, part mundane entanglement, part spiritual fusion. Karin, a 21-year-old cello virtuoso, is both devoted to and maddened by her father, a moderately successful musician who until now has been her only teacher. Karin's tantrums might pass for belated adolescent rebellion, but the sequence where she runs blindly through the woods before emitting a paint-peeling offstage scream hints at something more, to use one of Johan's favorite words, catastrophic. In a scene eerily reminiscent of Johan and Marianne's postcoital dialogues, Karin and her father climb into bed together, and the camera fixes on her face as Henrik discusses his longing for his late wife, Anna, who died two years previously.

Anna's photograph, which fills the screen during Henrik's monologue and several times later in the movie, turns out to be that of Bergman's late wife, Ingrid, a covert insertion that reveals both Saraband's deeply personal origins and its moments of opacity. Bergman, of course, has never shied away from confronting the mysteries of the universe (sometimes with an elephant gun). But Saraband's revelations are at once tendentious and obscure, superficially obvious but more profoundly indeterminate. When Johan bursts into Marianne's bedroom in the middle of the night and tells her, shivering, "I'm too small for my anxiety," his existential terror is offset by the unspoken question: Who isn't?

In a sense, Scenes from a Marriage was Bergman's rewrite of Ibsen's A Doll's House, whose contemporary relevance Marianne and Johan debate in an early scene; by the series' conclusion, Marianne has emerged from the guileless prison of her marriage and rejoined Johan, if only temporarily, on something like equal terms. But Saraband opens with an oblique refutation of the slamming door that signals Nora's freedom in A Doll's House. As Marianne searches Johan's empty house, a door slams, then slams again, as if Nora's emancipation has only succeeded in trapping her in a new prison. A generation after Marianne's hard-fought freedom, Karin is just as ensnared by masculine manipulation, caught between her father's grasping love and her grandfather's opportunistic charity; Johan offers her financial independence and a chance to study abroad, but only as a way of crushing his hated son's heart. Exactly why he so despises his son is never hinted at, but then Bergman's characters have never needed a reason to loathe each other.

Neither an old man's crowning masterpiece nor an explosion of long-suppressed creativity, Saraband inevitably falls short of the expectations longtime Bergman admirers will bring to it. Its moral weightiness and ponderous dilemmas seem like relics from a bygone era. But as the lacerating paternal monologue that breaks through Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen makes clear, Bergman's influence lives on, although he may be more useful as a signpost than a destination.

Saraband Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman A Sony Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse recommended