Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Saraband / Sweden / 2003

NYFF COVERAGE – Since the release of Ingmar Bergman’s “last” film, Fanny and Alexander, in 1984, the director has kept busy with an array of projects in print, in the theater, and on television. This last set of works, the handful of TV movies that Bergman has directed or written in the last twenty years, has offered some of the most personal insights into the life of an already confessional artist. Through his novels and screenplays for Private Confessions, Sunday’s Children, and Best Intentions, Bergman has mined his family history, and films like After the Rehearsal and In the Presence of a Clown map the often perverse, but cathartic process of artistic work. What emerges from these films is the image of an arguably self-indulgent, but always self-revealing filmmaker, almost masochistically exposing his fears and flaws to his audience.

Saraband, which is reportedly Bergman’s last filmed work of any kind, is an excoriating and revelatory experience, scrubbing away yet another layer of skin from the image that the director has created for himself. Once again, the subject of the film is tortured family relations, particularly between parents and their children. This has been Bergman’s focus since the very outset of his career. Early films like Frenzy and Crisis portray young characters in opposition to the repressive attitudes of an unsympathetic patriarchal society (mirroring Bergman’s own fraught relationship with his strict clergyman father), and later, such films as Wild Strawberries and Through a Glass Darkly explore the other side of this equation, specifically the inability of parents to live with their own children (echoing his own much-publicized marital and parental deficiencies). Saraband further explores the great distances between parents and children, as well as their ever-conflicting desires of clinging and turning away.

The film reunites Johan and Marianne, the alternately combative and mutually dependent couple at the center of Bergman’s 1973 television film, Scenes from a Marriage. After some thirty years of separation, Marianne suddenly feels a desire to seek out Johan, who lives in quiet seclusion in his “lair” in the “deep, dark forest.” Staying with Johan for a few weeks, Marianne soon becomes embroiled in her ex-husband’s strained relationship with Henrik, his son from an early marriage, and Karin, Henrik’s daughter. Henrik’s obsessive, destructive and not altogether paternal relationship with his daughter, and his humiliating, financially dependent association with a father he loathes (“I’d happily watch him die of some horrible disease”), threaten the lives and sanity of all involved, tearing open the old wounds of the family. And in the background, the specter of Anna, Henrik’s benevolent, long-dead wife, looms in the characters’ memory, a painful reminder of a slightly sunnier past.

Like much of Bergman’s late work, Saraband explicitly refers to early films from the director’s career. Scenes from a Marriage is an obvious point of reference, though it is deceptive (Bergman has altered some significant details about the characters’ lives, notably their ages). So are Hour of the Wolf (with the book-ending device of Liv Ullmann’s direct address of the camera) and Fanny and Alexander (with its scenes of Helena, the grandmother, poring over the mounds of photographs that narrate her life with her husband).

But Saraband is foremost a confessional work, and more importantly it is one that plays with the lines between the director’s life and career, and between real life and artistic work in general. Arguably, the film is the work of a man much like Johan, who has “ransacked [his] past” and found that “it has been shit.” But even Johan’s bitterness and defeatism is stripped naked and exposed as the fumblings of an old man: as Marianne tells him, “Sometimes you are like a forgotten character from some stupid old film. You’re not quite real.” Ultimately, Saraband further reinforces the sadness and pain of Bergman’s principal theme, the difficulty of living with, communicating with and depending upon lovers, children and parents. Dedicated to Bergman’s wife, Ingrid, who died in 1995, the film also mourns the loss of those people (for Bergman, nearly always women) who, like Anna, “existed in this world to make life less unbearable.” Finally, Saraband laments the difficulty of living and of traversing the distance between people, the exertion necessary to touch even one’s own child.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Sony Pictures Classics 35mm print
15 Oct 2004 7:06 PM | Submit Comment