Saraband

Reunions aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, especially if the reunion in question involves two characters from a 30-year-old Ingmar Bergman movie. Endless talk of death, cancer, regret, betrayal, disability and emotional impotence: It’s all just another night at the movies for the famed Swedish master of mortality. Although he’s been churning out the occasional script, the 87-year-old vowed long ago never to direct another film. He came out of his self-imposed isolation to craft this swan song, a compact, biting follow-up to 1975’s brilliant relationship drama, Scenes from a Marriage. If you’re a fan of that film, Saraband will provide some closure to the off-again, on-again affair between Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and her poisonous ex-husband Johan (Erland Josephson). But be warned: No one ever really gets closure in a Bergman film.

Although it begins as sweetly as one of those “golden years” movies you might see on network television, it doesn’t take long for the characters to revisit old wounds and resentments. A true chamber drama, Saraband takes place in a remote location — the elderly Johan’s summer cottage — where he lives with a son from another marriage, Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt), and his granddaughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius). Into this insular world walks Marianne, long out of touch with her ex and looking to reunite, at least as friends, before his death. While Johan may be less of a negative influence on her than he once was, she quickly learns that he’s caused irreparable damage in the lives of his offspring. Emotionally shunned by his father, Henrik is now a bitter, shattered man who never recovered from losing his wife Anna to cancer. Now, he’s transferred his suffocating love for Anna to Karin, a cello prodigy whose future both Henrik and Johan want to control. Marianne bonds with Karin — no doubt seeing similarities in their predicaments — but the years of familial neglect may be too much for the aging woman to undo.

The four leads are faultless, and through the use of carefully composed close-ups, the director coaxes performances of heartrending intimacy from them. This is a film about reserved people whose “voluntary confinement” has caused them to lash out in unexpected and sometimes shocking ways: It’s emotional but never melodramatic. “Life has become a ritual,” Johan says, and Bergman goes on to explore how that ritual can be passed on, seemingly genetically, from father to son. This sequel may not have the mood or scope of Scenes from a Marriage — it’s less episodic and far more plot-driven — but the director’s delicate camera movements and intentionally claustrophobic use of space are as effective as they ever were. Watching Saraband, it’s like he never stopped making films at all.

Michael Hastings writes about film for Metro Times. Send comments to [email protected].