Themes: Families in Crisis, Breakups and Divorces, Fathers and Sons
Main Cast: Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson
Release Year: 2003
Country: SE
Run Time: 107 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
As the final masterwork of Ingmar Bergman, the world's most revered cinematic craftsperson, Saraband (2003) embodies the sequel to the director's 5-hour Scenes from a Marriage, produced and directed 30 years after that original epic. Here, Bergman revisits the two characters from that film, divorcees Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann), after years of estrangement from one another. Marianne now lives alone; of her two middle-aged daughters from the marriage to Johan, one lives in Australia, while the other suffered a mental breakdown. Marianne has contact with neither. After leafing through an assemblage of old photographs and waxing nostalgic, Marianne decides to revisit the now-wealthy Johan, who lives in the country with an adjoining cottage and two descendants: his 61-year-old widower son Henrik (Borje Ahlstedt of I Am Curious - Yellow) and Henrik's 19-year-old daughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius). The relationships in Johan's family are broken and deeply dysfunctional; Johan resents Henrik, whom he perceives as worthless in every capacity other than fatherhood; Henrik resents Johan for his niggardly attitudes about his wealth; Karin feels bound by familial shackles and yearns to escape the confines of the life that ensnares her, ultimately hoping to move to the city and pursue her dream of becoming a cellist. Bergman uses the central narrative to examine how parents can damage one another by wielding the demands of their own selfish egos and refusing to grant joy and contentment to themselves or their children. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
In Saraband, Marianne travels into the country to the home of her ex-husband, and father of her daughters Martha and Sara, Johan. Johan is undergoing a family crisis with his insolvent and needy son, Henrik, and granddaughter, Karin. Karin is 19, and Henrik asks Johan for an advance on his inheritance so that Henrik can buy Karin an old Fagnola cello, to make a better impression at the audition for the European music conservatory. The elderly Johan decides to consider the offer and to contact the cello dealer himself. While Henrik is away tending to the orchestra he conducts in Uppsala, Johan has a private meeting with Karin, informing her of a proposal from Ivan Chablov, head conductor in the St. Petersburg orchestra and an old friend of Johan, that Karin join him at a prestigious school in Helsinki. While considering this offer Karin also finds an old letter from her departed mother Anna written to Henrik a week before her death. In the letter, Anna asks Henrik to relieve Karin of the unhealthy control he holds over her as her cello teacher. When Henrik encounters Karin again upon his return from Uppsala, where he no longer holds a position as concertmaster, he attempts to convince Karin into performing a concert of Bach's Cello Suites with him. She finally confronts him about his control over her and tells him of her decision to take an opportunity to study with her friend Emma in Hamburg under Claudio Abbado. The final request by Henrik is that Karin play the 5th sarabande from Bach's Cello Suites, which she already knows. We encounter Marianne and Johan some time later, after Karin has already left for Hamburg. Marianne receives a phone call stating that Henrik has been found in the hospital having attempted suicide with pills and by cutting his wrists and throat. In the next scene a pained Johan suffering from a sort of anxiety attack seeks out Marianne and eventually disrobes along with her and joins her in bed. Next, Marianne is holding a still of the couple in bed and explaining what happened after that episode. She explains how she and Johan had kept in contact until one day she was no longer able to reach him. She thinks again of the departed Anna and recollects a visit to her ill daughter Martha. She explains the contact she shared with her daughter and how she had never really been able to touch her before this moment.
First scene
The movie opens with the camera on Marianne standing by a table covered with photographs. It is a well-lit room, and she addresses the viewer. She picks one picture up after another; they are in no particular order, being just heaped all over the table. Some make her smile, or elicit a comment or a sigh. But then she picks up a photograph of her husband, prompting her to reminisce about how they had been more or less happy, and how they'd broken up. She goes on to recall how his second marriage failed, while she was already married to a second husband herself, and then when her second husband died (by flying a plane off somewhere and disappearing), she reflects that it would be nice to see her first husband again.
