Saraband
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Movie Reviews of Saraband
Movie Review: Bergman's Swan-Song?
Summary: 5 Stars
"Saraband" is the name of a movement in a classical piece of music by Bach. It is also the name of a dance and just like a piece of music Ingmar Bergman weaves his story to a certain rhythm of emotions.
"Saraband" touched me on a deeply personal level. It is the greatest movie going experience of my life. Now I know what many of you are thinking. How dare you! What about the "Lord of the Ring" movies, the "Harry Potter" series, the "Star Wars" movies and of course "Titanic". How on earth could I possible justify my reaction to dare say a much smaller film, a film that will go unseen by millions, yet alone, a Swedish film, is the greatest movie going experience of my life. Well you see I never really got caught up in the "Lord of the Ring" movies. I enjoyed them but I never read the books, nor have I ever read the "Harry Potter" books and I don't intend to ever read them, I simply don't have any interest. But what makes "Saraband", for me, the ultimate experience is the fact it was the first film I ever saw by Ingmar Bergman in a theatre. It was such an experience to be able to go out and watch a movie by my favorite director on the big screen. That is my explanation.
Bergman originally released this film two years ago on Swedish television just as he did "Fanny and Alexander" back in 1983. "Saraband" though is quite a cinematic event for film lovers. It is the first film Bergman has directed since 1984's "After the Rehearsal" to be released in theatres. Is that not cause for a celebration or what?
The film is a sequel to Bergman's 1974 masterpiece "Scenes From A Marriage". It is divided into 10 chapters and tells the story of Marianna (Liv Ullman) meeting Johan (Erland Josephson) 30 years after "Marriage". It is explained that Marianna simply had a sudden urge to visit him. Could it be as she grows older she wonders about what her life could have been like? Maybe. So the two meet as it turns out to be one of the most joyous moments in the film.
At this point it should be pointed out one doesn't have to watch "Scenes From A Marriage" to appreciate or understand this movie. But I must admit it does help. If only because to watch these characters on-screen is like visiting old friends. When we first see them meet our minds flood with images. We recall the first film and the impression it left on us. If you haven't seen that movie "Saraband" may have a harder time putting you under its spell.
As the film goes on we find out Johan's son, Henrik (Borje Ahlstedt) and his daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius) are staying in his guest house. We also find out Johan and Henrik are not really on the best of terms. At most it is polite conversation whenever they are in the same room. Which is something they both try to avoid happening.
Henrik plays cello and has been teaching his daughter, who has a great gift for the instrument we are told. But their relationship is a strange one. After Karin's mother died two years ago she feels she can not leave her father to go and study because it would shatter him. It is feared he might kill himself. But Henrik is not letting his daughter live her own life. The two get into an agrument which turns violent and suddenly I was thinking about the best friends and their marriage in "Scenes".
"Saraband" begins to tell the story of love, the past, and reconciliation between former husband and wife, father and daughter and father and son.
I wrote a review a long time ago for "Scenes From A Marriage" in it I said the movie has an intensity that few films have matched. Bergman just seems to throw these characters in our face as we watch them explode. I also felt it was the greatest film I had seen on the subject of love and marriage. "Saraband" is the only film that comes closet to matching that film's power.
I should though mention, in order to be fair and balanced, that "Saraband" is not a better film than "Marriage" I seriously doubt many fans will think it is either. That is not to say "Saraband" is not a good film. Or a nice companion piece to "Scenes". Or a film without beautiful dialogue, strong performances, and powerful directing. It is a touching absorbing film but it just didn't seem to hit me as hard as "Scenes" did.
Some of my favorite scenes in the film include a conversation between Henrik and Karin about an agrument Henrik and his wife had. Another powerful scene deals with Johan and Henrik. Here we can see what kind of relationship this father and son have. We can actually fill the hate and disgust between them. And finally a scene with Marianna and Karin, as Marianna describes Johan to Karin is quite moving. In fact all of the moments in this film are wonderfully expressed by this cast and Bergman's ear for dialogue.
Are their faults with the film? Yes. The relationship between Henrik and Karin seems very strange and deserved an explanation but is given none. Also information about Karin's future is never given and we are left with that same murkiness with Johan's future. Though all in all "Saraband" is a masterpiece that is dominated by strong performances. It's emotions are real and we believe what we are seeing. I can not recommend this film strongly enough.
Bottom-line: The greatest movie going experience of my life. Ingmar Bergman's sequel to "Scenes From A Marriage" may not be as powerful as that movie, but so few films are. "Saraband" though exceeds as its own film. It feels complete as is. It has powerful acting, strong directing, and some truly beautiful speeches all set to a wonderful score by Bach.
Movie Review: Curtain Call
Summary: 5 Stars
Bergman first introduced us to Johan and Marianne in his 1974 masterpiece Scenes from a Marriage, one of the cinema's most exacting dissections of our all-too-human failure to connect. Bergman and the splendid Scandanavian actors Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann took us through Johan and Marianne's marriage, divorce, and post-divorce reconciliation. In the end, they live apart, but still make room for the bond between them.
Three decades later, Bergman, Josephson and Ullmann have given us Saraband, a late-life gift. Marianne decides that even though she hasn't seen Johan since the 1970s, it's time to make contact again. Johan has inherited money from an aunt, and lives in splendid isolation overlooking a lake. She literally wakes him with a kiss, but soon enough Marianne's fantasy of an idyllic reunion evaporates as she gets drawn deeper into the power struggles in Johan's family.
Henrik, Johan's son, is staying in a nearby cottage with his daughter Karin. Both of them still mourn Anna, Henrik's wife and Karin's mother, who died two years before. Henrik, a music teacher, is preparing Karin, an accomplished cellist, for her conservatory entrance exams. The elderly Johan remains cold-hearted but charismatic (not unlike Bergman's own father) and one of the questions the movie explores is why people are so attracted to him. Henrik wants his father's affection and acceptance, even though Johan refuses to give it, ostensibly due to some slight by Henrik when he was 19 years old. In a painful scene, Henrik goes to Johan to ask for money to help Karin, and in his 61 year old face, we see the bewilderment of the boy who never came to grips with his self-absorbed father.
For Karin, her grandfather is a counterweight to the suffocating embrace of her father. Karin struggles to figure out what she owes Henrik, what she owes to the memory of her mother, and what she owes to herself. She lets Marianne see some, but not all, of the turmoil she's going through. For Marianne, her attraction to Johan remains as difficult to pin down as it was when she was married to him. She's always wanted something from him, but since she can't define what it is, she'll probably never get it.
The struggles between the characters get played out over ten riveting scenes bookended by Marianne's opening and closing monologues. Karin makes her choices. Henrik reacts. Marianne throws herself once more against Johan's emotional aloofness. As he's done throughout his brilliant career, Bergman brings it alive through artful dialog, perfect dramatic timing, and riveting cinematic composition. The characters are not always likable, but they are never less than engrossing.
The Criterion's DVD includes a mini-documentary of Bergman making Saraband. We watch the 87 year old director slump to the floor to illustrate some blocking, kid around with the crew, poke and prod his actors into position. It's a treat to watch him work. One wonders if any other director will ever elicit such an emotionally powerful performance from Julia Dufvenius, the fine young actress who plays Karin. One also wonders why Bergman put himself through the grueling labor of making another film after he'd announced he was through.
Bergman spent his entire career obsessed by the difficulties of human connection. Apparently he wants to say one last thing about it, which seems to be this: after all the tears and shouting, all the posturing and cruelty, all the reaching out and pulling back, this is what remains: marriages of true minds (the photo of Anna used in the film is a picture of Bergman's great love, his deceased wife Ingrid); the fraught ties of fathers and sons; memories of old loves; what you give and get from children; and the devolution of the flesh. None of it is easy, the master tells us, but all of it is necessary. In the end, it's all you have.
What's truly sad is that Bergman, sixty years after embarking on his cinematic journey, claims that he's done. He did for film what Shakespeare did for theater, took it to new levels by expanding the language used to describe the glories and follies of human striving. He will certainly be missed and he can't be replaced.
But don't see Saraband for nostalgic reasons. It's a moving, insightful film that deserves a place in the director's canon. Saraband stands on its own, but it's a deeper experience if you watch Scenes from a Marriage first.
Movie Review: Essential film genius: Bergman's 'Saraband.'
Summary: 5 Stars
"The sarabands . . . it takes a lifetime to master them."
The world lost one of its greatest film directors last week. In his "celluloid poems" (as Woody Allen calls them), film genius Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) examined the human condition in all of its bleakness, despair, humor, and hope, expanding our sense of what it means to be human. He favored intuition over intellect, and his films typically pondered the deepest concerns of humanity: mortality, loneliness, faith, and love (as in difficult, thwarted, repressed, and unexpressed love). Saraband (2003) is Bergman's final film release. The Swedish television movie is a sequel to Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage - Criterion Collection (1973), reuniting the characters of Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann ). Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap) followed the disintegration of Marianne and Johan's "perfect marriage," from the mutual misery that brought them together, to their inevitable divorce. Showing that the course of love never does run smooth, the film followed the turmoil of their ten-year relationship, a relationship that endured their divorce and subsequent marriages. Like Bergman's earlier film, Saraband probes the difficulties of human relationships, failed marriage, and the inability to communicate.
A "saraband" is a fast, erotic dance of the 16th century of Mexico and Spain; or a stately court dance of the 17th and 18th centuries, in slow triple time; or the music for either of these dances. Bergman's film opens and closes with Marianne (now 63) addressing the camera while she looks through old photographs scattered on a table. She summarizes the changes that have occurred in the thirty years since Scenes From a Marriage. A photograph of Johan reminds her of their life together, and how his subsequent marriage failed. She thinks that it would be nice to see him again, which prompts her to return to Johan's isolated country cabin. Upon her arrival, she awakens him from a nap with a kiss. Johan is now 86, and in the midst of a family crisis with his financially irresponsible and depressed son, Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and emotionally-distraught granddaughter, Karin (beautiful Julia Dufvenius), both accomplished cellists who are sharing a small nearby cottage. Although it has been two years, they are still haunted by the death of Henrik's wife, Anna. In the ten scenes of Saraband, Bergman probes the family's raw emotions (fear, disappointments, and regrets) resulting from Anna's death, preventing them from mastering their own lives.
Criterion released Scenes from a Marriage (ISBN: 0-78002-802-3) in a remastered three-disc set. Ideally, Saraband should have been included in that set to complete the Marianne-Johan series. Highly recommended.
G. Merritt
Movie Review: Bergman and the Joys of his Film Concerts
Summary: 5 Stars
For many years the films of Ingmar Bergman have haunted us, films that dare to enter territories untouched by others, peopled by actors of consummate skill, extended monologues both spoken and silent, and secret doors into the souls of some of the most fascinating characters created for the screen. SARABAND is no exception: this theme and variations is written and performed and directed to perfection. It leaves the viewer speechless.
Marianne (Liv Ullmann) is a successful lawyer in her 60s who returns to her ex-husband's solitary retreat just for a visit. Her ex-husband Johan (Erland Josephson), since remarried and redivorced, has a son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) by another wife who lives nearby on the lake: Henrik is a musician and writer and lives with his daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius), teaching her cello in preparation for an audition at the music conservatory. What Marianne finds after thirty years absence is that Johan and Henrik are on bitter terms, that Karin is frustrated with her demanding teacher/father, and that the recurring 'saraband' movement of this story is the mutual adoration and mourning of Anna, Karin's mother and Henrik's deceased wife. Marianne and Johan muse over their past lives, discovering that despite circumstances they still love each other. Marianne is able to open the hearts of Karin, Johan, and Henrik and provide a tender voice that brings a degree of resolution to a family broken.
As with all of Bergman's films it is not the story content as the method in telling that makes his films so indelibly and quietly passionate. Everything is understated: solo sequences are played with Bach's solo cello suites, and when two or more characters interact the music becomes Brahms and Bruckner. This is an elegant pastoral about looking into the mirror of our souls in old age and finding both the beauties and the missed opportunities of a life now passing toward the end. Each of the four actors is splendid, though watching Liv Ullmann in her native tongue is a renaissance of memory of all the fine work this extraordinary actress has done. Bergman gives us an elegy not a eulogy and one can only hope for more. Highly recommended on every level. In Swedish with English subtitles. Grady Harp, February 06
Movie Review: Love Marriage and Divorce Bergman Style Part II
Summary: 5 Stars
Ingmar Bergman's SARABAND could be considered a sequel to SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. In the film Bergman returns to familiar territory. Marianne and Johan, the main characters of the earlier film, meet after thirty years. Marianne is the one who initiates the contact, through we never know why, we realize somewhat quickly that she still loves Johan deeply, or at least a part of her does. Johan is irascible as ever through most of the film. We meet Henrick, Johan's son from a previous marriage and witness a father/son relationship that is at best, hate filled and spiteful. We see the troubling relationship that Henrick has with his daughter Karin, a musically gifted young woman. We are also unsure of the tension between Henrick and Johan, assuming at first it is stemmed from abandonment issues on the part of Henrick and a failure of Henrick to live up to Johan's expectations, but as the film progresses we come to see it may be far more twisted. Marianne seems to get stuck in the middle of the arguments much to the resentment of Henrick and Johan, but she becomes indispensable for Karin.
Needless to say, the film is complex, and Bergman handles the complexities by allowing them to puzzle and challenge the viewer which may be why the film is so engaging. It's also superbly acted by Bergman favorites Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson reprising their roles as Marianne and Johan from SCENES. Borge Alhstedt who plays Henrick has likewise has been cast in other Bergman films. As with so many Bergman films, meticulous attention is played to small details such as the vacation home, the country church, even the selection of music. In one scene we find Johan listening to Bruckner's Ninth in full volume, the bombast of the piece matching his personality. And of course, there's a "Bergmanesque" gut wrenching scream releasing more existential angst than imaginable, this time from Karin.
The film is sophisticated as opposed to sentimental, and if this is Bergman's last film, it may not be as lavish as some of his other works, but it does encapsulate much of what is great about Bergman. It's certainly a film that can be seen more than once and lead to lively discussions.