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'Saraband' explores failed love, need to connect

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the world cinema of the '50s, '60s and early- to mid '70s, there were giants on the Earth. Truffaut and Fellini. Kurosawa and Bunuel. Antonioni and Godard.

And Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish master whose soul-searching and psychologically acute films earned him three best foreign-language Oscars and secured him a permanent place in the pantheon of the movies' most brilliant visionaries.

Sony Pictures Classics

'Saraband'

A-

The verdict: A splendid and complicated farewell from a splendid and complicated filmmaker.

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Gunnel Fred, Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, Borje Ahlstedt, Julia Dufvenius
Run time: 120 minutes
Release date: July 8, 2005
Rating: R for brief nudity, language and a violent image.
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Bergman's last theatrical film, "Fanny and Alexander," was released in 1982. In the ensuing decades, he has busied himself with theater, opera and television. He also wrote scripts for others to direct, most notably Liv Ullmann, his one-time lover and all-time muse, and Bille August, who made the dazzling "Best Intentions," the story of Bergman's parents.

Now the filmmaker, who is in his mid-80s, returns with what he insists is his final film (though, like Cher, he's been known to say farewell, then renege). If we take him at his word, "Saraband" is a stunning and complex final bow from a stunning and complex artist.

Originally made for Swedish TV, the movie is a devastating yet relentlessly human dissection of relationships: fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, ex-spouses, even the mournful bond with a longed-for loved one, now deceased.

Bergman returns to Marianne (Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), the stormy upper-class couple who slugged it out in 1973's "Scenes From a Marriage." It's 30 years later and Marianne, directly addressing the camera, catches us up on her past three decades. There's not much to say. She's still a lawyer. Still alone. Still doesn't have much contact with either of her daughters by Johan. One is catatonic, living in a nearby mental asylum. The other now lives in Australia.

They don't call to her, but for reasons she can't explain, Johan, whom she hasn't seen since they divorced, does. So she travels to his beautiful summer house for a visit. "You don't seem very enthusiastic," she says when they first meet.

"Enthusiastic?" he snorts. "I said no."

Still, it's a mostly friendly reunion. The friction comes from elsewhere. From Johan's son from another marriage, the portly and insecure Henrik (Borje Ahlstedt), and his beautiful granddaughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius), a gifted cellist, who live in a nearby cottage.

When Marianne first enters Johan's home, a door mysteriously slams behind her, as if the place were haunted. In a sense, it is. By Anna, lovely and loving wife and mother to Henrik and Katrin, who died two years ago. Her absence is the most powerful presence in this tattered family and is manifested in some unusual and unsettling ways.

Most notably, Henrik sleeps in the same bed with his 19-year-old daughter, an inappropriate (to say the least) intimacy. Whether their relationship has been physically consummated or not, it's still chillingly creepy.

Meanwhile, Johan and Henrik are constantly at each other's throats, bound by mutual loathing and disappointment. They can barely stand to be in the same room, and when they are, it's ugly. Johan tells his 61-year-old son that if he weren't Anna's husband he wouldn't even exist for him. Henrik, in turn, divulges to Marianne that he hates his father in every sense of the word. "He has a fortune and he just won't die," he rather uncharitably adds.

Marianne mostly serves as a sounding board for this unhappy family, as tormented in their own way as O'Neill's poor Tyrones or any given group in an Ibsen play. Yet she may be the one most transformed by these encounters. Near the end of the film, she visits her hospitalized daughter and for the first time she realizes, "I was touching my child. I felt."

"Saraband" could mean that after decades of despair, emotional tumult and spiritual searching, Bergman has found at least one answer in E.M. Forster's gentle admonishment, "Only connect."

True, the connections in the movie are rarely gentle, but they provide a kind of wisdom, even if it's more hurtful than healing.

The title refers to an erotic dance for two that was popular at some royal courts in the 17th and 18th centuries, but was prohibited in others. Fittingly, "Saraband" is made up of a series of poisonous pas de deux — 10 two-person scenes (bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue) in which characters go head to head in a bitter clash of failed, misguided or misunderstood love.

At one point, Bergman offers a vision of death that's unexpectedly comforting, though laced with a chill. And he gives it to Henrik — poor, fat, unhappy Henrik, who recounts it as a dream. In it, he's walking along a stream on a foggy autumn afternoon and suddenly, there's Anna. And he knows he's dead. "We spend our whole lives wondering about death and what it's like," he says. "And it's this easy."

"Easy" was never a word one associated with Bergman — the man or his work. Yet in this final film, he offers this peaceful summing up of mortality. To sleep, perhaps to dream. And dream some more, in the new-found certainty that perhaps the answers were never as harsh as his questions.