Product: Saraband (2005)
Rating: 4.0
Wonderful, but the math is truly distracting
I watched "Scenes" and then watched Saraband the next day, hoping to get more of Johann and Marianne. It was great to see them so changed and yet still the same--Marianne still too-good-to-be-true and Johann still a jerk. Very early in the film, however, we are faced with a large discrepancy between Scenes and this film. In Scenes, Marianne is 35 and Johann 42. In Saraband, there is now a 23 year difference in their ages. Even within Saraband, the timing just doesn't work, as other reviewers have pointed out here. At first I was just confused, but then I was angry at the director for not respecting the fans of his older work. It reminded me of when characters age inexplicably on soap operas, like when Victoria aged ten years overnight on the Young and the Restless. I guess we can put up with that from Bergman but it would have been a lot less distracting if he had just made Marianne 70 and Johann 77 or something like that. It need not have changed the story.