Saraband

Bergman's cruelly sarcastic farewell, in which his distinctive imagery is only rather remotely reflected. A few of the shots have a breathtaking inner strength, a disturbing composition that brings intense uncertainty on the threshold of reality and dream. As in Scenes from a Marriage, the characters come to the fore here and most of the intensity and experience comes from their sophisticated psychology. With a good dose of sarcasm, Bergman returns to the fate of Marianne and Johan – while she retains her sympathetic fragility and vulnerability, her ability to bind in a motherly way, the painful Johan has definitely turned into a crotchety and internally angry caricature of himself. Saraband dances with the viewer slowly and melancholically, revealing with a certain skeptical jeer the themes of love, understanding, passion and old age. The scene where ex-spouses lie down in the same bed after years best reflects the strange illusory of understanding that is able to dispel terrible mental rages. Bergman left the door open. For the young and the up-and-coming, there is a chance to overcome the mistakes and guilt of the old, but time is, unfortunately, cyclical – and nowhere is it written that Johan's granddaughter Karin will not succumb to the same conditions as her ancestors, to whom she is bound by hurtful love. Saraband is a formally light, an internally but unusually urgent and elaborate farewell to Ingmar Bergman with film and life, i.e., two phenomena that form an integral unity in his work. (25/05/2009)