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Sep 7, 2008 9:02 PM CST |
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Saraband, in his own words his final film, is Ingmar Bergman’s first film shot in high definition digital video. It is a four character film, and features two characters and actors from his Scenes from a Marriage—Johann and Marianne—played by Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann. You can read a lot into this, as into all of the associations between the characters and Ingmar Bergman’s own life. Certainly those autobiographical elements are there, no less than in his other films. But in a way, thinking of these connections is cheating the film of its simplicity and essence, and it’s better to leave them behind. Instead ask, “Why did Bermgan make this film?” Perhaps he had the image in his mind to what would have happened to the Johann/Marianne couple from Scenes from a Marriage thirty years later. But more essential, I think, is that what interests Bergman now, today, as he lives in isolation on his island of Faro, grieving still the loss of his wife Ingrid von Rosen, who died of cancer in 1995. Saraband is a farewell film with a positive ending in which Bergman addresses the question of the transforming power of love. What will help us overcome the misery of human relationships? In Saraband, eighty-six-year-old Johann (Erland Josephson) is a recluse living in an isolated house in the country. Liv Ullmann (Marianne) a lawyer, “hears” his call and comes to visit. She stays an afternoon, a night, weeks. Johann’s son, Henrik, is staying with his daughter Karin at a guest house by the lake. Marianne’s arrival sets up the dynamics which brings them into contact with each other. The capacity of each of the four characters to love has been damaged. They are wounded, yet unable to overcome their own selfishness, to reach into themselves and connect to their emotions, or to touch others. Johann is the most obvious: a selfish old man growing deaf, cynical, and bitter, whose only relationship to his son Henrik is one of humiliation. He clings to his own bitterness, adroitly manipulating his granddaughter and savagely belittling his son with a careless cruelty, a mindless hatred. Even he ultimately reaches a moment when anxiety overtakes him, pushing, he tells us, out of his body through every open orifice. He crawls naked into Marianne’s bed. Even here, you could interpret an autobiographical connection to Ingmar Bergman’s own lifelong anxiety-based gastro-intestinal problems—but you see how pointless an exercise this is. Henrik, the son, played brilliantly by Borje Ahlstedt as the overweight, pudgy, yet strangely childish musician, is mourning the death of his wife from a long terminal illness two years ago. He smothers his daughter Karin, a talented young cellist, by controlling her through guilt. He insists on being her teacher, mentor, father. The daughter, with an astonishingly energetic performance by Julia Dufvenius, wants to find her own way, but she is trapped—a pawn in her father’s and grandfather’s hatred of each other. Saraband is constructed in ten scenes. We see mostly the faces of the actors, a brief shot of a landscape once. The film is very talky, almost classically distanced at the beginning. There are only the four characters, but we never see them together—it is always a dialogue between two of them. It is in their faces that the longing and pain, death and desire, compromise and sadness reveal themselves in the wrinkles, pores, facial fat, and very rare smile. But gradually Bergman leads us to the violent roots of this lack of love—the open wounds that the characters bare even as they struggle to escape from facing the mirror of themselves. Marianne, the relative outsider to the triangle of father-son-daughter, sympathizes with Karin, the young cellist who is at the point of sacrificing her own life and future, out of guilt and responsibility for Henrik, her dysfunctional father. Then, oddly, a chance letter that Karin finds in a book sets her free. The letter, from her dying mother, is written to Henrik. In the letter, her mother asks Henrik to let Karin go free. She sees the dangerous limitations of controlling love. Ingmar Bergman’s final film, Saraband, asks the pure yet essential question: “What is love if it does not lead us to freedom?” In the film’s final, moving scene, the epilogue, we see Liv Ullmann—a beautiful, aging sixty-five, encroaching wrinkles and a certain wise sadness in her face. She has learned that even a simple touch can bring awareness. Awareness of the freedom that love can bring is what gives love its transforming possibilities. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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