Johan isn't likely to make such a confession to anyone else in his life, but he may have a point. He has completely lost touch with his two daughters from his marriage to Marianne, one of whom lives in Australia and the other of whom is confined to an institution with an unexplained illness. He and his middle-aged son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) -- from an earlier marriage, before Marianne -- view each other with undisguised hatred; their relationship consists mostly of a not-so-cold war over Karin (Julia Dufvenius), Henrik's beautiful 19-year-old daughter. A washed-up and impoverished music professor, Henrik clings a bit too closely to Karin, who is a promising cellist. He is tutoring her privately and refusing to let her leave home until she's ready (in his eyes) for a conservatory. With his inherited wealth, Johan has grander plans for Karin, involving an antique Italian instrument, a prestigious Russian conductor and an exclusive music school in Helsinki. What only Marianne, as an outsider in the household, can see is that neither man seems ultimately concerned with Karin's welfare and that both are haunted, at least figuratively if not literally, by the ghost of Karin's mother, the beautiful Anna.

I don't want to say too much about the role that Anna plays in "Saraband," but it's safe to describe this as another one of Bergman's ghost stories, even if the dead woman never appears in any literal, Hamlet's-father manner. ("Saraband" is dedicated to Bergman's wife Ingrid, who died in 1995.) Over 10 numbered scenes with these four characters in the summer house (along with a mysterious epilogue that features a fifth person), this tense little saraband -- which is in fact an erotic dance as well as a musical form -- plays out. His great leonine head carved like a glacier and his eyes still burning with skeptical ferocity, Josephson plays Johan as a man essentially unbowed by age but almost eaten out from inside by his self-disgust. Ahlstedt nearly matches him; Henrik is a big, huggable walrus in a dingy undershirt, uneasily pitched partway between sympathetic and pathological. He tolerates terrible abuse from his father for Karin's sake -- but when you realize that he and Karin sleep in the same bed, well, you'd be right to wonder about how healthy this whole situation is.

I imagine "Saraband" will be a gripping experience even for viewers new to Bergman, but there's no question that his fans will find in it countless echoes -- ripples may be a better word -- of his earlier work (even beyond the fact that this is a sequel of sorts). There are cuckoo clocks, doors that close without human agency, letters read by people to whom they're not addressed (with fateful consequences), suicide attempts played as very dark humor, Spartan country churches, a young girl who cannot communicate with her father and escapes into the forest. (I would enumerate the references, but they're almost too many to count.) This is also a story of an old man who knows that he has drawn very close to death, that it could come at any time. As Bergman viewers know, this is scarcely a new theme for him. If that awareness is more present for Bergman himself than ever before, it nonetheless does not dominate this film. For all the alleged darkness of his work, Bergman's movies are more about how to survive and even how to love than they are about death or despair, and "Saraband" is no exception.

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