Although he had announced some time
ago that he was giving up filmmaking, Ingmar Bergman, now 86, has directed a
new movie, Saraband. A kind of
sequel, after the passage of some 30 years, to his Scenes From a Marriage, the picture reunites the principals from
that work, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, as Marianne and Johan, and
examines — what else? — their fraught, complicated relationship from the
past, while introducing some further difficulties.
Aside from their issues, Johan’s son
Henrik, a still grieving widower, and his daughter Karin, suffer their own
intense and perverse emotional extremes. The movie proceeds through a series of
long, stagy two-shots, claustrophobically limited, in which the characters
endlessly discuss the past and the state of their own feelings Johan is a nasty
piece of work, Henrik is a weakling, Karin is a talented, but confused cellist,
and Marianne, who frequently speaks to the camera, seems about the nicest and
sanest person in the cast.
Bergman fans may love the monochrome
color scheme, the slow pace, and the endlessly talky script; the rest of us
wish him well in his retirement.
Saraband (R) opens Friday, September
16, at the Little Theatre. Scenes From a Marriage is showing
Sunday, September 18, at George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre.
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2005.
