TV review

Ingmar Bergman (2003)

As this website’s home page admits, amnesia is a main reason for keeping a record of the films I’ve seen and I first saw Saraband before I was writing reviews regularly (not to say anally).  I shouldn’t be surprised to have remembered very little of the film – Liv Ullmann startled by a chiming cuckoo clock early on, Erland Josephson’s dead-of-night panic attack near the end, and next to nothing in between.  I was surprised, though – this is Bergman, after all – and that revisiting Scenes from a Marriage earlier this month didn’t trigger further memories of the older versions of Ullmann’s and Josephson’s characters, Marianne and Johan, in this belated sequel.  The only other thing I recalled about Saraband was thinking it wasn’t much good.  Watching it again has done more than confirm that view:  I’ve a good idea now of why Bergman’s swansong didn’t leave a stronger impression first time around[1].  It’s a fallacy to suppose that it’s about the same two people whose relationship made Scenes from a Marriage, despite its faults, so absorbing.

The lack of connection between the two pieces is reflected in three ways.  First, Saraband isn’t, as its supposed predecessor was, a virtual two-hander:  Marianne and Johan have hardly more screen time than two of the other characters in the story.  Second, Bergman is less concerned with the relationship between the former married couple than with Johan’s relationships with these two other characters, and, eventually, the effect of those relationships on Marianne’s feelings about one of her children.  Third, Johan is biographically not the man he was.  A couple of important things have changed for Marianne, too.

In the magazine interview they give at the start of Scenes from a Marriage, the husband and wife disclose their ages as forty-two and thirty-five respectively.  They tell the interviewer that they got together after Marianne’s first, short-lived marriage and loss of a baby, and the end of Johan’s affair with a pop singer.  In Saraband, meeting again for the first time in decades, they have to remind each other how old they now are.  Fair enough but he says he’s eighty-six, while she says she’s sixty-three.  It’s possible that Johan is expressing how old he feels but just as likely that Bergman means the characters now to be closer than they previously were to the ages of the actors playing them.  (Although the seven-year difference in the earlier film didn’t seem implausible, Erland Josephson was actually fifteen years older than Liv Ullmann.)  What’s more, Johan has a son, Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt), who’s nearly the same age as Marianne and of whom no mention was made in Scenes from a Marriage, and a nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius).  Karin was the name of one of Marianne’s and Johan’s two daughters in Scenes; the other was Eva.  They’ve now turned into Sarah and Martha.  Johan is still their father though he acknowledges he knows nothing about what they’ve been doing for the last three decades.

These factual discrepancies might have served to signal how people and relationships change – or how much a long-estranged couple might forget about their former life – if Bergman had continued to focus on Marianne and Johan. Since he doesn’t, you’re left wondering why he didn’t just reunite Ullmann and Josephson to play a different once-married pair.  In monologues addressed to camera at both ends of the film, Marianne sits alone at a table piled with photographs – that is, with memories – but she and Johan say hardly anything about their past together.  Although Marianne still practises family law, her role in one-to-one conversations with Johan, Henrik and Karin brings to mind, rather, the psychiatrist that Liv Ullmann played so memorably in Bergman’s Face to Face (1976).  Johan’s Scenes from a Marriage life is pretty well expunged by the legacy that Marianne explains in the film’s opening words:

‘Johan became a multi-millionaire in his old age.  An old Danish aunt who had been a renowned opera singer left him a fortune.  Once he became financially independent, he left the university.   He bought his grandparents’ summer house – a run-down chalet in an isolated area near Orsa.’

It’s to this summer house (now refurbished) that Marianne comes early in the film after deciding, following the death of her second husband, to renew contact with Johan.  From what they both say on her arrival, the visit is expected to be short.  In the event, Marianne stays for what seems to be a matter of months – until the tensions within Johan’s family tensions have fully played out.

Johan seems to have inherited from the rich aunt not just money but a passion for classical music, which also governs the lives of his son and granddaughter (who live together nearby).  Henrik, an orchestra conductor and organist, is perennially insolvent.  He begs his father, who detests and despises him (the former feeling at least is mutual), for an advance on his inheritance in order to buy Karin a Fagnola cello ahead of her forthcoming conservatory audition.  While Henrik is away conducting in Uppsala, Johan contacts the cello dealer independently and, for good measure, informs Karin that the head conductor of the St Petersburg orchestra, who happens to be an old friend of Johan’s (!), has proposed that Karin join the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.  Also during her father’s absence, Karin discovers a letter that Anna, his late wife, wrote Henrik shortly before she died.  In it, she urged him to relax the control he exerts over their daughter, who is also his cello pupil.  Henrik returns from Uppsala having lost his conducting job and tries to persuade Karin to perform a concert of Bach’s Cello Suites with him, including the Sarabande from Suite 5.  Karin in effect thwarts both sides in the power struggle between her father and grandfather when she eventually decides to study in Hamburg.

The musical interests he shares with the characters may not be the only element to derive from Bergman’s own preoccupations.  Saraband carries a dedication to ‘Ingrid’, presumably Ingrid von Rosen, his last wife, who died in 1995.  Anna, whose death occurred two years before Marianne’s visit and the events outlined above, appears only as a face in a photograph yet she’s strongly present in the narrative.   She’s just about the only thing on which Johan, Henrik and Karin seem to agree:  all three loved and were distressed to lose her.  From the photo frame, she seems to be reviewing, in sorrow more than anger, the emotional mayhem now raging within the family.

Perhaps Bergman is also, and not for the first time, soul-searching about his relationships with his own children.  One of Marianne’s daughters is (as far as her mother knows) happily married, living and working in Australia; the other daughter, Martha, as Marianne explains in the prologue, ‘lives in a home, sinking in the isolation of her illness – I visit her now and then but she doesn’t recognise me’.   After she returns from her stay with Johan, Marianne goes to see Martha (Gunnel Fred) in the institution:  unseeing and virtually catatonic, Martha brings to mind the seriously disabled younger daughter neglected by her mother in Autumn Sonata (1978) in favour of a successful career as a classical concert pianist.  Recounting this visit to Martha in what are Saraband‘s closing words, Marianne says that she thought of Anna’s maternal example and felt ‘for the first time in our lives … that I was touching my daughter’.  The words chime with the last line of Through a Glass Darkly (1961):  the son of an emotionally distant father exclaims incredulously that ‘Papa spoke to me!’  (Through a Glass Darkly also features Bach cello music on the soundtrack.)  It’s even possible to see in her father’s determination to control Karin’s artistic destiny echoes of Bergman’s relationships with younger actresses in his films, some of which were also sexual relationships.  If Bergman is blurring these two things in Saraband, the result is troubling, implying as it does incestuous feelings on Henrik’s part.  In one scene, he and his daughter are in bed together; shortly after her departure for Germany, Henrik attempts suicide, though, as with most things in his life, he fails.

Although she feels sorry for Henrik, Marianne can’t help sharing Johan’s dislike of him, though she doesn’t voice it as his father does.  Liv Ullmann is marvellous in these moments of cold, controlled anger, splendid, too, when warmer emotion rises in her cheeks and eyes as she finally describes her visit to Martha.  At other times, Ullmann isn’t as wholeheartedly truthful as she usually is:  when she first arrives at the summer house or goes into a church where Henrik is playing heavenly organ music, she moves unnaturally slowly and her wondering gaze is uncharacteristically mask-like.  Throughout the film, Erland Josephson is as sharp-eyed and quick-witted a presence is ever.  The contrast between these qualities and the old man’s body they’re now bound up in, is compelling – especially in Johan’s climactic terror.   He struggles with it on the bedroom landing before knocking on the door of Marianne’s room and trying to explain what he’s feeling:

‘It’s an anguish from hell.  It’s bigger than me.  It’s trying to make way through every orifice in my body – my eyes, my arse.  It’s like a huge mental diarrhoea … I’m too small for this anxiety.’

Josephson’s vocal and physical expression of this horror is a brilliant and brave piece of acting from an actual octogenarian.  Johan pulls off his nightshirt, tells Marianne to remove her nightdress and clambers into her bed, where she comforts him.  Here, at last, we truly recognise the protagonists of Scenes from a Marriage, and the reciprocation of Johan’s comforting of Marianne in the bed they ended up sharing in the earlier film’s last episode, ‘In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World’.  As will be obvious from most of the above, the chief interest of Saraband comes from finding resonances with earlier and, in every case, stronger Bergman films.

19 April 2022

[1] Saraband was originally screened on Swedish television before receiving an international theatrical release.  The film shown in cinemas ran 120 minutes, thirteen minutes longer than the TV version.  The latter was the version screened this month by BFI.  Needless to say, I can’t remember which version I previously saw!