Saraband

"Saraband" is a difficult film. The two leads are lifted from Bergman's swedish television masterpiece, "Scenes from a Marriage," but beyond this simple detail film carries no real similarities to the former. The film begins and ends with Liv Ullmann speaking directly to the viewer. Each of the following sequences is shot as a series of duets--two characters engaging in a metaphorical dance. "Saraband" is intended as a stand alone film. It is emotionally disturbing and bleak. It seems to

Only Bergman can end his own career and still make something great. Sure, because of his declaration anything he made after Fanny & Alexander seemed like an afterthought, but with the right promotional material (a Criterion blu-ray) it bypasses that idea and then some.

I've seen too many directors losing their vision and their work crumbling into most basic elements making me wonder if the originals were coincidental. Luckily Bergman is not one. Not only he continiued his major characters consistently(even though not the way I envisioned) and takes the story further with infants in the preceding movie. Last great piece before the journey ends.

This is no easy, nostalgic or sentimental trip back to the world of Johan and Marianne, but a hard, painful and complex look at life and death by an artist who has lived and who is in mourning for the woman to whom he longs to return. A great, late and vastly underappreciated movie from the late, great and, these days, underappreciated Ingmar Bergman. A superb, surprising sequel to one of the great movies of all time, featuring the careful dialogue and controlled camera that are his hallmarks.

To judge this as a sequel is to diminish it. It's a superb film in its own right, and except for a few small details it doesn't rely on the previous film at all. The cast is uniformly superb and some of the subtleties in the relationships become clearer on a second viewing. I also like how it's structured, a series of 10 dialogues, never more than 2 people in a scene. As the title implies, it's almost musical in its form... slightly artistic and slightly mathematical.

Bergman is still good and in shape.

Y'know, I could have seen a new Bergman film in the theatres as a teenager and that feels weird. This is a sequel in the sense that it's a continuation of the two characters from Scenes from a Marriage, but the film goes past that, and features an array of characters trapped by the past. Not sure what was more shocking -- a father open-mouth kissing his daughter or seeing male full-frontal in a Bergman.

Bergman's last film is dedicated to his late wife, who posthumously gets to portray the dead wife of one of the characters. So yeah, not a comedy. Starts out as a straight sequel to SFAM, then gets hijacked by new characters into a family drama where everything may be too late to fix. Annoying TV soundstage cinematography and some odd pacing aside, Bergman goes out on... not quite a masterpiece, but a movie that very effectively says, "That's a wrap."

Bidding farewell in a way perhaps no other director will be able to. Still relevant without losing the organic matter that built these characters. Thank you Bergman.

While I can appreciate how good the writing and performances are (and they really are top-notch), I wished Bergman would have done more in this work with the tools available to him as a film-maker. Maybe something a little more visual. A little less theatrical and staid. The sequence of static two-hander scenes feels a little bit like a sombre parade towards death. Not his finest, but a few remarkable moments within it nevertheless.