That Old Feeling: To Liv With Bergman

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Ghosts haunt the house Marianne has just entered. Doors slam shut without warning or visible agent; a cuckoo clock breaks the silence with its bizarre chimes and chirps. The middle-aged woman survives these little shocks and finds the man she's looking for. Dozing on the veranda is Johan, her long-ago husband, whom she has not seen for many years. His age, 86, has enfeebled him; his hand shakes from Parkinson's. He is beyond the spontaneous gesture: "I intend to put my arms around you," he announces before they share a starchy hug. And his world view is devoutly frosty. "Sometimes," he tells her, "I look at my voluntary isolation and think I'm in Hell. That I'm already dead, though I don't know it. My life has been shit. A thoroughly meaningless, idiotic life." Looking at the old cynic, Marianne can't help smiling.

In the first few minutes of Saraband, certain viewers will slip instantly into the world of Ingmar Bergman. The immediate clue is the presence of two familiar actors, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, stalwarts of the Swedish writer-director's informal repertory troupe. Here they are revisiting the roles they played in the 1972 Scenes from a Marriage, to which the new work is not so much a sequel as a descendant. There are also echoes of a dozen or more of Bergman's despairing, exhilarating films. The old themes nudge you: death, and those who aspire to it; love, and how it sours; the inexorable decay of the body and the spirit; the need to reach out for others, and the fear that in doing so we will claw them, or be devoured.

Dear seekers of light summer entertainment, you have gathered that Bergman's film is not Shrek 2 or Wedding Crashers. It's more like Shriek 42 or Marriage Crushers. To moviegoers raised in the Age of Facetiousness, a dead-serious story about the pain people maliciously or clumsily inflict on themselves and one another must seem a blast from the past. A blast of musty air, that is, best suited for quaint old art-film houses, where the scent of cappuccino mixes with an aura of intellectual smugness. Titles like The Naked Night, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, Persona, Cries and Whispers, Autumn Sonata, Fanny and Alexander and After the Rehearsal, which once constituted a summa-cum-laude cinematic honor roll, have since tumbled into Trivial Pursuit territory.

But Bergman, who made Saraband two years ago and turns 87 on Thursday, is secure enough not to care what people think of him, or to fret that they may not think of him at all. Neither do I. I've been a Bergman admirer since the 1950s, as I will itemize ad infinitum in my next column. So I welcome his return. No matter how severe the emotional landscape, his palpable presence behind the camera, and the force he still bring to a wrestling match with his demons, are causes for celebration. The Master has returned, in triumph.


TORMENT

Saraband, which Bergman shot on digital video (and which will play in theaters only in that format), is not really a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage. It uses the two main figures from the earlier film to explore new relationships: Johan's with his son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and Henrik's with his teenage daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius). All three have been handicapped by desolation over the death of Henrik's much-loved wife Anna. Henrik, a failed musician, has transferred his ambition to Karin, a promising cellist. When Anna was alive, Henrik was lost in love with Anna; and, Karin says, "I was a little shut out of that love." Now Karin is all he has. His ardor, as two startling moments indicate, is at least emotionally incestuous. One scene begins with Henrik in bed with his daughter; another includes a kiss that begins as tearful love and briefly surrenders to Henrik's passion.

With the same intensity as he loves Karin, Henrik loathes his cold-fish father. "I hate him so much I'd happily watch him die of some horrible disease," he tells the shocked Marianne when they meet in the deserted village church. "I'd visit him daily and take note of his torment down to the last breath." Johan is equally venomous, telling his son, "If you didn't have Karin, who, thank God, takes after her mother, you wouldn't exist for me at all." But behind his contempt is the ache of envy. Johan, whom Marianne describes as "notoriously and compulsively unfaithful" and who never came within shouting distance of marital bliss, finds it "incomprehensible that Henrik was given the privilege of loving Anna and that she loved him."

Here they are: love, God and death — the old Bergman trinity. Here it is: "Filote me" ("Forgive me!") — the old mantra of Bergman characters who have committed so many transgressions. Here again are characters who remorselessly analyze and criticize themselves, squeezing the life out of a feeling before they can experience it. Bergman's gift is just the opposite: he takes this familiar, punishing scenario and, through his spare artistry and the devotion of his actors, squeezes life into it.

Example: Henrik, the most tortured of this quartet, is allowed to reveal his charm before his pain, then his white-hot hatred, are allowed to postulate. Similarly, flashes of grace appear, like epiphanies in the January snow. In church, after Marianne has been singed by Henrik's rage against his father, beams of sunlight burst through the window; it is the visual counterpart of the organ chord that greeted Marianne as she entered. Later there's a privileged moment when Karin is told of a career opportunity and the ecstasy of anticipation briefly floods her face, as radiant as that sunlit church. Bergman keeps energizing Saraband with such touchstones; he builds the edifice of the film on this latticework. And these superb actors — three veteran colleagues, one (Dufvenius) a newcomer in the great tradition of Bergman ingenues — give the characters sinew and subtlety.

The totality is an amazingly vigorous achievement — and not just for an old man. (Only the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who at 96 has completed 10 feature films in the past decade, has outlasted Bergman.) Saraband is a film worthy of being counted among Bergman's strongest. Which means among the finest there are, or are likely to be, for a while.


THE ACTRESS AND THE DIRECTOR

It may seem ghoulish to go fishing for real-life connections between the sad characters in Saraband and Bergman's own turbulent domestic life. But his films are so personal, and he has been so outspoken about writing his emotional autobiography on the screen, that such expeditions are inevitable. So know that Saraband is dedicated to Ingrid, Bergmans fifth wife, who died in 1995; she likely inspired the film's much-mourned Anna. Bergman's relationships with his children, especially his sons, were often stormy. One child he did feel close to, as Johan does to Karin in the film, was Maria von Rosen, Ingrid's daughter by a previous marriage. Last year Bergman revealed that Maria was his own daughter, and published Three Diaries, which described Ingrid's last days from her own, her husband's and her daughters journals.

In preparing a piece about Bergman and Saraband for the magazine, I was blessed to be able to speak with Ullmann. At 66, the Norwegian actress could comfortably retire after 40 years as an international star and the muse of Bergman in one of his most fertile filmmaking periods. Yet she has equaled her acting work by directing: four features, including two Bergman scripts, Private Confessions (1976) and Faithless (2000). A few Ullmann quotes illuminated the TIME story. Here is the meat of the interview, in which she speaks warmly about her life and career with Bergman and frankly about some of the family specters he conjured up:


TIME: Since Ingmar Bergman had written scripts over the past 20 years, and entrusted them to directors like yourself, I wonder what forced him back behind the camera this time.

ULLMANN: This one was so personal. The whole writing was very personal. And I believe that only he would really want to make into a film. I also think it was tempting for him, one more time, to work with some favorite actors, and to go into the studio one more time.

TIME: He's been working on the stage until just a few years ago.

ULLMANN: Yes. The last thing he did was Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, three or four years ago. Then he said "this is the last." And when he did this film, which was a surprise for everybody, he said "This is the last I do," in terms of script and film. And now I know he really means it.

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