Product: Saraband (2005)
Rating: 4.0
Scenes from a Marriage II: This Time, It's Even MORE Personal...
Francois Truffaut once wrote that, in Ingmar Bergman's films, only the women are three-dimensional characters - the men are all ciphers. I don't know if the men are necessarily ciphers in this film, but they certainly have issues. Saraband, of course, is the sequel to Scenes from a Marriage. I didn't like the character of Johann then, and I like him even less now; he is a selfish, sadistic man who uses everyone and feels endlessly sorry for himself. The other male character in the film is his elderly son, Henrik. Johan has always been a bad father to Henrik and now, as a result, Henrik has turned into a monster. The two of them live nearby so they can torture each other as Henrik grieves for his wife.Henrik lives in a cottage with his eighteen-year-old daughter, Karin. In fact, the two of them sleep in the same bed. They have a quasi-incestuous relationship - if not an actually incestuous one.The movie is composed of ten chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. We take up with Marianne (Liv Ullman) as she is going over a table of pictures. Speaking directly to the camera, she reflects on her life and her thoughts turn towards her ex-husband, whom she hasn't seen in thirty years. She decides to pay him a visit. As with many Bergman films, Saraband is a ghost story without a ghost. Marianne arrives to a haunted house - doors open and close by themselves. But it is not the house - it is the characters who are haunted.Bergman claims that this is his last work on film. Thank goodness he had another great film left in him. It is a shame however, that his mind seems made up. There is a "making-of" documentary on the disc in which the old master looks pretty spry.