Product: Saraband (2005)
Rating: 5.0
Curtain Call
Bergman first introduced us to Johan and Marianne in his 1974 masterpiece Scenes from a Marriage, one of the cinema's most exacting dissections of our all-too-human failure to connect. Bergman and the splendid Scandanavian actors Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann took us through Johan and Marianne's marriage, divorce, and post-divorce reconciliation. In the end, they live apart, but still make room for the bond between them.Three decades later, Bergman, Josephson and Ullmann have given us Saraband, a late-life gift. Marianne decides that even though she hasn't seen Johan since the 1970s, it's time to make contact again. Johan has inherited money from an aunt, and lives in splendid isolation overlooking a lake. She literally wakes him with a kiss, but soon enough Marianne's fantasy of an idyllic reunion evaporates as she gets drawn deeper into the power struggles in Johan's family.Henrik, Johan's son, is staying in a nearby cottage with his daughter Karin. Both of them still mourn Anna, Henrik's wife and Karin's mother, who died two years before. Henrik, a music teacher, is preparing Karin, an accomplished cellist, for her conservatory entrance exams. The elderly Johan remains cold-hearted but charismatic (not unlike Bergman's own father) and one of the questions the movie explores is why people are so attracted to him. Henrik wants his father's affection and acceptance, even though Johan refuses to give it, ostensibly due to some slight by Henrik when he was 19 years old. In a painful scene, Henrik goes to Johan to ask for money to help Karin, and in his 61 year old face, we see the bewilderment of the boy who never came to grips with his self-absorbed father.For Karin, her grandfather is a counterweight to the suffocating embrace of her father. Karin struggles to figure out what she owes Henrik, what she owes to the memory of her mother, and what she owes to herself. She lets Marianne see some, but not all, of the turmoil she's going through. For Marianne, her attraction to Johan remains as difficult to pin down as it was when she was married to him. She's always wanted something from him, but since she can't define what it is, she'll probably never get it.The struggles between the characters get played out over ten riveting scenes bookended by Marianne's opening and closing monologues. Karin makes her choices. Henrik reacts. Marianne throws herself once more against Johan's emotional aloofness. As he's done throughout his brilliant career, Bergman brings it alive through artful dialog, perfect dramatic timing, and riveting cinematic composition. The characters are not always likable, but they are never less than engrossing.The Criterion's DVD includes a mini-documentary of Bergman making Saraband. We watch the 87 year old director slump to the floor to illustrate some blocking, kid around with the crew, poke and prod his actors into position. It's a treat to watch him work. One wonders if any other director will ever elicit such an emotionally powerful performance from Julia Dufvenius, the fine young actress who plays Karin. One also wonders why Bergman put himself through the grueling labor of making another film after he'd announced he was through.Bergman spent his entire career obsessed by the difficulties of human connection. Apparently he wants to say one last thing about it, which seems to be this: after all the tears and shouting, all the posturing and cruelty, all the reaching out and pulling back, this is what remains: marriages of true minds (the photo of Anna used in the film is a picture of Bergman's great love, his deceased wife Ingrid); the fraught ties of fathers and sons; memories of old loves; what you give and get from children; and the devolution of the flesh. None of it is easy, the master tells us, but all of it is necessary. In the end, it's all you have.What's truly sad is that Bergman, sixty years after embarking on his cinematic journey, claims that he's done. He did for film what Shakespeare did for theater, took it to new levels by expanding the language used to describe the glories and follies of human striving. He will certainly be missed and he can't be replaced.But don't see Saraband for nostalgic reasons. It's a moving, insightful film that deserves a place in the director's canon. Saraband stands on its own, but it's a deeper experience if you watch Scenes from a Marriage first.