Review of Saraband (2003) by Jc C — 07 Oct 2007

A film by Ingmar Bergman? For some, that is news on a par with discovering a new symphony by Gustav Mahler. The only reason that Bergman's film didn't get the fanfare you might expect is that it was a television play, first broadcast in Sweden 4 years ago. Saraband is a sequel to his 1973 feature Scenes From a Marriage, in which a couple played by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson split up, and then have an affair that offers them painfully raw truths about their partners and themselves that the comfortable intimacy of marriage had rendered invisible. This film reunites the characters after 30 years.

This is wintry film-making with a wintry view of existence, and film's final discharge of emotional agony is, if not perfunctory exactly, then simply taken as read in dramatic terms. A traumatic episode of self-harm is succeeded by another scene on a different subject - and the consequences of a suicidal gesture are not dwelt upon. As if from a helicopter with an aerial view of man's folly and conceit, Bergman sweeps on to different vista, and I admit I wasn't sure if Marianne's final encounter with her disturbed daughter, a character who appears only in the film's final moments, is entirely satisfactory in structural terms. The film's action certainly reveals relations between parent and child that are intractably raw, and poised above a terrible moral abyss. There is no easy reconciliation between Johan and Marianne - in fact they rarely have scenes together - and the confrontations between Johan and Hendrik are comparable with Saul Bellow's great novella Seize the Day.

Nothing in contemporary cinema has quite the same high-mindedness and passionate severity. Its dramatic idiom is not so much dated as isolated. No one else makes films like this. Saraband could be Bergman's swansong, and yet even if we feel wrung-out like a dishcloth at the end of it, there is absolutely no sense that the director feels the same way, no hint of a decline in energy or power. On the strength of this, Bergman could well write a whole new series of intense chamber dramas. His staff, unlike Prospero's, is still unbroken.