|||||| The Planet of Great Moviez ||||||||: Saraband (DVDrip

Saraband is the last motion picture directed by Ingmar Bergman - his parting gift to the medium that made him world-famous. Saraband is an astonishment: vital, powerful, magnificent. Granted, when a great filmmaker, however ancient, makes a sublime work of art, it should not come as such a surprise. We can place this film alongside Dreyer's Gertrud, as a fellow Scandinavian's uncanny last word on the capricious power of love, in its positive and destructive aspects.

It might be said that Bergman shifted his emphasis from "Does God exist?" in the Fifties and Sixties to "Does love exist?" in the Seventies. Marianne spent much of the five-hour TV series, Scenes From a Marriage (73), worrying whether or not she truly loved Johan, or even knew what love was. Saraband has been billed as a sequel; and up to a point it is, since it returns to the same duo, Johan and Marianne (played by the older but still incomparable Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman). They have not seen each other for many years, when Marianne gets the sudden impulse to look in on her ex-husband, who has inherited millions from a rich old aunt and now lives in "the wilderness" by himself, in his grandparents' summerhouse. Marianne, competent, compassionate and controlling as ever, still practices family law on occasion; Johan has long since retired from academia, and has grown more crochety and intimacy-averse. Though their old relationship wounds are touched upon, the film wisely spends little time revisiting them. By now each is supremely unillusioned, and they get by with a testy forbearance that is not without tenderness

The film is structured as a series of 10 duets, with the dyadic personae shifting from scene to scene: first Johan and Marianne, then Marianne and Karin, then Karin and her father, then Johan and Henrik, then Henrik and Marianne, and so on. Each scene is introduced by its number and chapter title, reminding us that we are watching a self-consciously made narrative, with the theatricality of blackout skits. In addition, a prologue and an epilogue both show Marianne alone, addressing the camera with her thoughts. All these distancing formal devices, however, melt away in the face of the dramatic intensity and internal psychological reality of the unfolding dialogues.

Slowly, the pivotal character in the story turns out to be one who makes no actual appearance: Anna, Henrik's wife, who died of cancer two years earlier. Anna, by all accounts, was a loving wife; and it was the "miracle" of her love, all the more saintly as it was bestowed on someone so seemingly unlovable, Henrik, that sets each of the others brooding. Johan, who seems to have been more than a little smitten with his daughter-in-law, keeps a framed photograph of her in his study. "It's incomprehensible that Henrik was given the privilege of loving Anna. And that she was so devoted to him!" he snarls jealously. Marianne remains an agnostic when it comes to love. She, too, finds herself staring at the dead Anna's enigmatic photo smile and wondering what this woman could have been thinking and feeling - what gave her the power to love? Henrik is so obsessed with his late wife that her loss has left him feeling disabled and suicidal. Karin finds a letter from her mother addressed to her father, which prophetically warns him not to abuse Karin's youthful affections, by transferring his all-consuming conjugal love from mother to daughter. This letter, this deathbed effort to free her, "is what love is," Karin asserts confidently, though the older Marianne is still unsure.

Intelligently framed, well-lit, mobile, crisply edited, and entirely adequate for its purposes, Saraband is a great film. Phillip Lopate, Film Comment, September/October 2004

|||||| The Planet of Great Moviez ||||||||

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Friday, August 3, 2007

Saraband (DVDrip - 2003)

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