The Swede Hereafter

I'm leaving now, and this time I mean it: Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Photo Bengt Wanselius. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

Of the filmmakers who first defined and popularized art-house cinema on this continent, only three are still alive and kicking: Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. Okay, scratch that — only one is really kicking, and that’s Godard. The Swiss-French auteur continues to make films that are as incendiary and original as any made during the halcyon nouvelle vague. Antonioni, rendered mute by a stroke over ten years ago, still produces the occasional film (with the assistance of people like Wim Wenders), but these have been wan, almost self-parodying. Bergman, who just turned 87, has twice announced his retirement from cinema, most recently after the release of arguably his most beloved film, 1982’s Oscar-winning Fanny and Alexander. He has continued, however, to operate on the periphery of the medium.

His latest — and reportedly final — film, Saraband, was originally created for television, and it’s clear that the director continues to rage against the dying of the winter light. The film might not be his finest achievement, but like his best work, it is both pleasurable and punishing. And Saraband’s modest means — four characters, minimal mise-en-scene, pallid digital veneer — is more than compensated for by its grand and astringent vision.

Saraband is a sequel of sorts to the Swede’s 1973 film Scenes from a Marriage (which was itself originally a television miniseries). In that film, Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann played Johan and Marianne, a couple riven by a bipolar intimacy. Unlike Bergman’s more notorious films, Persona or The Seventh Seal, Scenes eschewed abstract symbolism in favour of a more playful, messier and, to this reviewer, welcome domesticity.

Saraband reunites Josephson and Ullmann thirty years later. For reasons not apparent to the audience or even herself, Marianne travels to the 86-year-old Johan’s summer home. Their old affection is immediately apparent, as is the volatility of that affection. They joke, flirt, berate, reminisce. They also soon disappear for much of the film. Bergman is more concerned with the relationship between Johan’s estranged son, Henrik, and Henrik's daughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius). And, complicating this pas de deux, Johan and Henrik’s own stormy relationship. The recently unemployed Henrik (played by a phenomenal Börje Ahlstedt) and the 19-year-old Karin are both cellists, living in a cottage on Johan’s estate, where Henrik provides instruction to his brilliantly talented daughter. She, in turn, provides him with succour, vicarious success and fierce, if confused, love and loyalty. (A saraband, we learn, is an erotic dance popular in European royal courts in the 17th and 18th centuries.) Anna, Henrik’s beloved wife and Karin’s mother, has been dead for two years, but her memory goads and haunts all of the characters.

Reunited and it feels so... weird: Erland Josephson as Johan and Liv Ullmann as Marianne in Saraband. Photo Bengt Wanselius. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

With its placid camerawork, mostly interior sets, and a revelation that arrives in the form of a handwritten letter, Saraband has a hermetic quality. Bergman uses this to full advantage: occasional scene and temporal shifts are jarring enough to snap the spine.

Watching Saraband, it’s difficult to shake the sense that, just as Bergman has (mostly) absented himself from the world of filmmaking, so the world of filmmaking has (mostly) moved on without him. The setting’s apparent isolation from the real world — the only modern convenience is a telephone — further punctuates this.

Once upon a time in North America, the best — and most popular — foreign films came from Europe, and they were solemn, slow, serious. Now, they’re more likely to originate in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and are as effervescent and frisky as the best Hollywood potboiler. (Two of the finest foreign pictures released this year have been from Korea: Save the Green Planet! and Oldboy.)

The always-contentious film historian David Thomson claims that for many filmgoers, Bergman “showed the way to a cinema of the inner life.” I think Thomson is using “inner life” as shorthand for “lack of spectacle.” Bergman’s quietly seething films often featured ordinary, if well-bred people with extraordinary neuroses, crises and spiritual dilemmas. The typical audiences of Thomson’s generation — the first to really embrace psychoanalysis on a widespread scale — were equally highly cultured and highly strung. The fact that very few filmmakers followed in Bergman’s footsteps is proof of his singularity. In terms of his influence in North America, there is, of course, Woody Allen’s slavish imitation — the dreary, unintentionally comic Interiors is the most shining example. But there are only vague echoes of Bergman in, say, Atom Egoyan’s parables of passive-aggression or Martin Scorsese’s more repressed moments.

Keeping it in the family: Julia Dufvenius as Karin and Börje Ahlstedt as Henrik. Photo by Bengt Wanselius. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

To many younger viewers, Bergman is, if anything, a joke on SCTV. His overweening concern with our existential abyss now has a fusty, outdated feel; in a secular age, it seems both quaint and irrelevant. The religious themes in many Bergman films are borne of a faith that is constantly questioning itself. It’s less Bill O’Reilly, more Kierkegaard.

And, indeed, at a crucial juncture in Saraband, Bergman bluntly invokes the Danish philosopher. Johan is alone in his library, walled in by books, when a fearful, trembling Henrik enters, pleading for an advance on his inheritance. Johan closes the volume he was perusing — Kierkegaard’s Either/Or — before belittling his feckless offspring. Their altercation is the most venomous father-son exchange I’ve seen in a movie, and the actors revel in lines like, “There’s a healthy dose of hatred in your general mushiness.” As cruel as Johan may have been to Marianne three decades ago, his inexplicable disgust for his son is all-consuming. Bergman’s sympathies, however, seem to lie with the older man, and he reserves the film’s most tender moment for Johan. After suffering a late-night anxiety attack, he visits Marianne in her bed, where he eagerly sheds his nightshirt, desperate for some human contact at last.

So too, apparently, is Bergman. It’s perhaps facile to read Johan as an autobiographical figure. (The idea is further complicated by the fact that Bergman uses a photo of his own late wife for that of Anna.) Yet the director’s own detachment makes it inevitable. Saraband seems like Bergman’s last bid to reach out and affect a mainstream audience that turned away long ago. Even if the film’s temperament no longer jibes with our own, Bergman’s insistence on the necessity of human anguish feels timeless, his exploration of the depths of desperation still necessary.

Saraband opens July 22 in Toronto and Vancouver and August 5 in Montreal.

Jason McBride is a writer and editor based in Toronto.