Car chases. Pratfalls. Delightful misunderstandings. You won’t find any of these in Saraband, Ingmar Bergman‘s unexpected cinematic encore. For those who felt that 1985’s Fanny And Alexanderhad a little too much pep about it to bring the great man’s career to a fittingly doomy close, Saraband, a sequel to the supremely tortured Scenes From A Marriage of all things, should prove much more satisfying.
While Scene’s Marianne (Ullman) and Johan (Josephson) are reunited 30 years after their tomb of a marriage has ended with no apparent bad blood, subsequent generations provide a whole new batch of emotional scabs to pick away at. As the older couple wait for death and fill each other in on three decades of ache (“They took away my uterus and ovaries“ sighs the venerable Ms. Ullman), Johan’s 62 year old son Henrik (Ahlstedt) battles for complete control over his teenage cellist daughter (Dufvenius). Mostly, though, this dysfunctional collective read Kierkegaard and say depressing things to one another. “Sometimes I look at my voluntary isolation and I think I’m in hell,” observes Johan.
Hell or an Ingmar Bergman film. Though very boxed in appearance (it was made on HD for television) and not quite up there with The Virgin Spring or Persona, Saraband is certainly magnificently pained and astute. It would be nice to think that Bergman could once again be persuaded from retirement, but alas, at 87, he’s unlikely to hit those glum notes for our benefit again. Last chance to see…