"Saraband"

Is this really the 86-year-old Ingmar Bergman's last film? Maybe. More important: Is it among his finest?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Oct 15, 2004 | I'm definitely not neutral when it comes to Ingmar Bergman, but the astonishing thing about "Saraband" is not that he's made another film at age 86 -- it's how lean, sharp and vigorous it is. There is nothing here of the fuzzy sentimentality that clouded the lenses of his contemporaries like Kurosawa, Truffaut and Fellini as they drew near the ends of their lives (or, for that matter, that has inflected some of Bergman's recent, mild-tempered work). Amid the over-stylized clutter of so much contemporary film, this movie's combination of naked, almost ruthless family drama, visual intensity and narrative economy feels like a blast of cold Scandinavian air from a suddenly open window. If this doesn't rank among Bergman's very best works, that's an impossibly high standard; "Saraband" still strikes me, on first viewing, as the best-crafted, least self-indulgent film I've seen in years.

This is meant to be Bergman's last film, but as actress Liv Ullmann quipped at a press conference after the New York Film Festival screening I attended, he has said that before. Several times, in fact. ("Saraband" premieres in the festival on Friday.) "Fanny and Alexander," the sweeping family chronicle that summarized much of his accomplishment, was Bergman's first farewell. That was 22 years ago. Like any artist still in possession of his faculties, Bergman has been unable to stop working, but without quite reneging on his promise. Since the mid-1980s he has directed plays for the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm, written novels and memoirs, and even authored screenplays for other directors (including Bille August and Ullmann, his longtime collaborator). He announced his retirement from the theater in 1995, but hasn't stuck to that either -- I saw his production of Ibsen's "Ghosts" last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Over the years, he has also directed several modestly scaled television productions that began to seem, more and more, like new Ingmar Bergman films.

Now comes "Saraband," which despite its fusty-sounding classical-music title is an intense emotional stew that reunites Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Ullmann), the feuding, neurotic couple from Bergman's 1973 "Scenes From a Marriage." Creaky, crotchety Johan is almost exactly the director's age, and Bergman himself was once married to Ullmann, so it may be tempting to read the story of this marriage and its aftermath as autobiography. Ullmann explicitly denies this, and as usual with works of art, it's probably more fruitful to assume that some act of psychological translation is occurring. Johan may reflect a certain aspect of Bergman's personality, but if so it's one he would like to ventilate or exorcise as much as possible.

When Marianne shows up at ex-husband Johan's inherited summer home -- longtime Bergman viewers will immediately recognize this house, or at least this kind of house, as an archetypal element in his work -- they haven't seen each other for 32 years. She's a Stockholm lawyer, drawing near retirement age, reasonably content, perhaps a little lonely. His conclusions about himself are different: "My life has been shit," he tells her, "a totally meaningless, idiotic life." Nope, we're nowhere near Golden Pond in this portrayal of old age.

Next Page: Another Bergman ghost story

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