Film: Saraband (2003)

Title: Saraband

Year: 2003

Country: Sweden

Director: Ingmar Bergman

It is needless to present Ernst Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918) to the lovers of cinema, yet his last movie, Saraband (2003) is hardly a blockbuster and will hardly ever be. According to Bergman himself, this is “his last movie ever” and I hope it is not, because as a finale to a rich cinematic life as that of Bergman’s this movie is hardly conclusive.

Female narrator/protagonist named Marianne, a dull, uninspiring piece of acting by Liv Ullmann (a Tokyo-born Norwegian), portraying a rigid and somewhat condescending, yet polite female lawyer (“family law, divorces mostly…”) in her 60s who decides to take a trip to the country-side villa where her ex-husband Johan (dark and somber Erland Josephson) resides, following the three decades of their living apart.

The most interesting detail about the plot is an attempt at finding the key to one’s personal identity and history of a ruined life: contemptuous ex-husband, an equally morbid and contemptuous step-son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) who feels somewhat incestuous towards his daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius), Martha (played by Gunnel Fred vaguely appearing towards the end of the film), a brain-damaged daughter of the lawyer woman herself who can’t recognize her surroundings and is confined to a dark hospice room…

Everything in the acting exudes apathy and snoozing. There’s no single breath of Bergmanian artistry neither about the plot nor about acting. Now, someone may contradict saying that every thing Bergman is just that: apathy, boredom, and snooze.

Well, it is the early Bergman, the black-and-white one of While The City Sleeps (1950) or that of The Seventh Seal (1957) is the kind of Bergman that will remain for ages in the cinematic history and we can distinctly place ourselves in the post-war void context of Europe of the day. Yet when watching Saraband I hardly knew what context I have to place myself into. This is a distinctly provincial Swedish affair, but it is also time-less: anything you point at is just not from this day and age, yet you can hardly tell what day and what age this is: it is unashamedly dusty day and age.

What truly caught my eye in the film, is the beauty of a landscape. Meet pristine hills, valleys, forests and brooks. Young Julia Dufvenius wearing just a white night gown and a pair of leather soldier boots (director’s erotic fantasy, no doubt), entering that forest bog water, surrounded by the age-old firs… It is truly not of this world. The austere interior of a Scandinavian country villa adds to the ghostly atmosphere.

If not for the (Scandinavian-style) cynicism of the protagonists, I would have thought the movie is just dull and melodramatic. It is this witty cynicism of the replicas that makes up for the lack of spice to the acting.

A lot of things are said and written about Scandinavian puritanical culture and its drawbacks and strengths. Perhaps, Bergman wanted to un-spoil us in terms of expectation. It is true that today’s cinema audience is not just spoiled; our cinematic tastes are in ruin. We hardly know what we want from a good movie any longer, unless ‘we’ means an utterly retarded blockbuster audience. As regards timelessness, as well as in terms of fitting into the here and now, I think Bergman simply lost it, given that he still accentuates things that hardly need to be accentuated nowadays, as opposed to when Bergman was young: social rigidity of the old-time puritans masking their cynicism and hypocrisy, lack of meaning about this puritanical world for those in dire need of meaning, the everlasting void of a country parish life (Bergman’s beloved theme) exemplified by an empty church (except that Bach is played in it), family constraints and psychological deformity that puritan family life exudes.

Despite these drawbacks, the two male actors playing father and son respectively: Erland Josephson and Börje Ahlstedt are quite good in portraying a dead father-and-son relationship as well as the latter’s feelings of misery are done excellently. This is probably the best and the strongest side to the movie. Were I given a chance, I would do a movie just with them two and the young girl briefly appearing in her night gown and soldier boots (alright, I will let that one in) to serve cookies and tea to them.

The final scene: that of the mother visiting her mentally handicapped daughter is vividly existential; a good illustration of how mother’s suffering is recycled into a semblance meaning: “It’s as if for the first time I felt my daughter.”