Saraband

I saw Ingmar Bergman's self-proclaimed final film Saraband a few months ago as part of the swedenmade film festival organized by SFS. I wrote this immediately after, but it was homeless for awhile because this blog hadn't been set up, and when it finally had, reviews of the SIFF films inundated it enough to keep this for later. So I'm posting this here now, a little late and irrelevant, but at least it would keep the blog from sounding so echo-y-y-y-y-y...y.


In Saraband, love doesn’t just hurt. It destroys, maims, suffocates and fucking kills. Cheery, but not all that atypical of Bergman films. His latest shows that he remains the same intellectual agonizing man whose self-exile to the Faro Islands provides him with intense existential crises every other day. Thinking this sequel to the masterful Scenes from a Marriage would be a Bergman-filtered Before Sunset (in which the actors age along with the characters), I expected these characters (who I adored in the preceding film) to mellow, or to become, at least, more resigned to fate, if not just a little wiser. Instead, recalling the chilly gloom of his earlier trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence), these characters exist in a godforsaken landscape, having only grown harder and more bitter, and despairingly pessimistic about their age as death looms. None of them are heroic, or even very religious – a new character Henrik (played by Börje Ahlstedt in the customary stiff upper-Bergman way) uses an ancient chapel merely as a place to practise the organ undisturbed – they are cowardly and pathetic, and pitiable.

For them, there is no salvation nor comfort. Love provides them with more suffering and anger than solace. More than most of his other films, I get the feeling that there is so much violence here, both physical and verbal. Perhaps it goes to show that love is violent and, above all, destructive. The characters repeatedly hurt each other through their casually brutal words, and when anger finally manifests itself physically – in a scene reminiscent of Erland Josephson’s stunning violent outburst in Scenes From a Marriage – it is made all the more intense because it is an act borne out of intense and inexpressible love, not hatred. But then again, love and hatred have always been separated by such a fine line, and perhaps the most painful thing about these characters is that they are all too aware of this themselves. They feel guilty about hating the people they love, and try to pull away from this hideous nature. And being unable to, they in turn feel bad about this inability. They are trapped again and again in their self-created loneliness, agonizing about it to an unanswering God.


In a particularly revelatory scene, Liv Uhlmann’s Marianne turns and walks away from the altar as the clouds lift and a ray of glorious sunshine penetrates the darkness of the ancient chapel, where prayers have been cast blindly through the ages. She turns and is suddenly struck by a painting on the altar - a mural that shows Jesus Christ thronged by followers, with one, in particular, who clings on desperately to his outspread arms, hungry for a shred of his love. The scene - which could also easily be frowned upon as being too sentimental amongst the more intellectual circles who prefer the metaphysical abstractness of the earlier trilogy – is one which binds the movie together, not only bringing Marianne and Johan back into the focus of what was ostensibly a story about their children, but also points out how difficult it is for people to love each other. Love might’ve been present, but, as seen in the failed marriage of Marianne and Johan, love is not enough. As the people in the mural remain starved for love, so are the characters who can’t seem to love each other the right way. So much so that they often turn to a non-existent entity as an ideal for love and truth – in this case, the decidedly unreligious characters can only remember a dead person (Henrik's wife, Anna, played by Bergman's late wife) as the apotheosis for love, modeling and recompensing her love but never reaching it. If her love seems unreal even for the people who had known her, she becomes even more of an ideal to Marianne, who has never met her, and is now enamored by the possibility of being able to love and be loved in equal heights.

Watching this movie, it suddenly occurred to me that most of Bergman’s characters can’t cry. They might yell and scream, sob and wail, even thrash around, but a close-up to the face would immediately show them almost completely dry-eyed. It almost seems to me that Bergman is deliberately denying them the basic catharsis known to all men since birth; that they’ve become such hardened creatures to others as to themselves that they are unable to even confront their own emotions, constipating in their bursting emotions and drowning inside, dying every day from each tear that cannot be shed. In the last segment of the film, Johan suddenly has a nervous breakdown in the darkest hour before dawn, the hour when regrets and losses hit the insomniac with the soberest force. Being unable to hide from these emotions yet incapable of expressing them is perhaps one of the most painful ways to die. So it is perhaps some sort of a miracle, that Marianne genuinely breaks down in the very final scene of the movie before the movie camera quickly fades to black. Could it be the stoic master of pain finally giving his characters some way of redemption as his final swansong?