Last Roar From a Legend

By RICHARD CORLISS

Sensible, sixtyish Marianne (Liv Ullmann) is getting exasperated with her cranky, octogenarian ex-husband Johan (Erland Josephson). "Sometimes," she says, "you act like a forgotten character from some stupid old film." That moment in Ingmar Bergman's new film Saraband will stir recollections in viewers who are Marianne's age--or maybe Johan's--since the two characters and the same actors appeared three decades ago in Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. But to the majority of 'plex patrons, it is the Swedish filmmaker who is the forgotten man.

Once the king of the art-film jungle, Bergman has been consigned to a venerated but remote corner of the cultural zoo. In his cage, three foreign-language Oscars (for The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly and Fanny and Alexander) gathered dust as the ancient creature sat still as a statue.

But now the old lion has roared back to life with one last sublime work. Saraband, the first film Bergman has directed for theatrical release in 20 years (he announced his retirement after Fanny), is a chamber piece: four characters, 10 dialogues. Yet Bergman, who turns 87 this month, gives the story such vigor and rigor, so much emotional bile and spilled blood, that it would shame a much younger director. Here is no mild afterthought to which a critic nods indulgently. This is a testament of love and anguish from the man who used to be called the greatest living filmmaker. Well, dammit, he was. And, as Saraband proves, he still is.

Bergman's need to scream out his fears and hatreds is also evidence of a weird vitality. His gift was always to find universal significance in his private agonies. In a 60-year film career, he has picked at the scabs of his psyche, turning wounds into eloquent words, nightmares into indelible images.

It was that mixture of the confessional and the majestic that made him, in the '50s and '60s, the living symbol of film as literature, movies as high art. With his dense, dead-serious studies of God and death, love and sex, Bergman was dubbed the Shakespeare of the cinema. Two-week-long retrospectives of his films ran in commercial theaters around the country. Critics in the U.S., Britain, France and Sweden wrote full-length studies of his films. In 1960 Bergman graced the cover of TIME, and Simon & Schuster published a book of four of his screenplays--a rare tribute to a movie playwright. The tonier cocktail parties were rife with debates on the elusive, allusive meanings of such films as The Silence and Persona. A Bergman film was like the toughest, most rewarding college course. You crammed for it.

In the '70s, whether or not they knew his name, moviegoers saw Ingmar Bergman films. His influence was everywhere: in the look and some of the scenes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (inspired by The Seventh Seal), in the horror film The Last House on the Left (a remake of The Virgin Spring) and any number of Woody Allen films, including Interiors (in the manner of Cries and Whispers). On Broadway, Stephen Sondheim transposed the domestic deceptions of Smiles of a Summer Night into A Little Night Music.

Bergman's influence was matched only by his energy. He had enough to direct a full load of plays for nine months a year, then shoot a movie masterpiece on his summer vacation; enough to exhaust five wives and many mistresses, including some of the leading actresses who so brilliantly glamorized his films. His early-'50s liaison with Harriet Andersson stoked a smoldering sexuality in Summer with Monika and The Naked Night. Then Bergman took up with Bibi Andersson, who embodied a breezy blond life force penetrating the darkness of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.

Ullmann was one of those muses. She moved in with the director 40 years ago during the making of Persona and starred in eight more Bergman films in the next dozen years. (Their daughter Linn is now a novelist.) Ullmann had not appeared in one of his works since Autumn Sonata in 1978, though she directed two of his late scripts, Private Confessions and Faithless. It was that last project, in which Josephson starred, that spurred Saraband. "When Erland and I did Faithless, we made a kind of goof version of Scenes from a Marriage just for fun, showing that Marianne and Johan were now old and really gaga," says Ullmann. "I sent the tape to Ingmar, and he loved it. And later he said, 'You know, I am writing something about Marianne and Johan.'"

Bergman had entrusted other scripts during his post-director phase to Ullmann and Bille August (The Best Intentions). Those stories were about Bergman's parents. This one would be, metaphorically but unsparingly, about himself and his children. That, Ullmann believes, is the reason he chose to direct Saraband himself. "The story was so personal," she says, "only he could make it into a film. Also, I think, it was tempting for him to work with some of his favorite actors one more time and to go into the studio one more time."

Saraband--which Bergman shot on digital video and will play in theaters only in that format--is not really a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage. It uses the familiar figures from the earlier film to explore new relationships: Johan's with his son Henrik (Boerje 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. Now Karin is all he has. His ardor, as two startling scenes indicate, is at least emotionally incestuous.

With the same intensity, Henrik loathes his cold-fish father. 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."

Ibsen's Ghosts was the last play Bergman directed before retiring from the stage in 2002, and Saraband is a virtual ghost sonata. The most palpable specter is Anna, whose death has sapped much of the life from her survivors. (Bergman dedicated the film to Ingrid von Rosen, who married him in 1971 and died in 1995.) There are other hints of ghosts in doors that mysteriously slam shut and in the sunlight that bursts like a visual organ chord through the windows of a village church. But Saraband is also haunted by the ghosts of Bergman films past--not just the fractured family lives in Scenes from a Marriage, Through a Glass Darkly and Autumn Sonata but also the spareness of landscape and acuity of pain in Winter Light and Persona. All are surveys of the damage we do to ourselves and those we try to love.

Long ago, we may infer, Bergman made a pact not with the devil but with his art. He would be true, remorselessly faithful, to the demons he put on the screen while his children and all his women put up with his compulsive infidelities and nurtured their own resentments. He once related that he acknowledged to one of his sons, then a teenager, that he might have been a bad father, and the lad spat out, "Bad father? You've never been a father at all." The dialogue is repeated verbatim in Saraband.

Ullmann, who says the film "is very much about his relationship with his son," defends Bergman's use of private details in his public confessions. "Sometimes, if you're a genius, you have to be ruthless ... some kind of a cannibal. You have to be able to look at people, love them, recognize them, but also take from them." She recalls that in Scenes from a Marriage, Bergman showed a photo of Ullmann and her first husband--the man she deserted in 1965 to live with the filmmaker. Ullmann says that her ex "got so upset, he left the room, and he never saw the end of the movie. But I understand it; it's part of being creative." That understanding shows the trust Bergman's actors have in him. He strips himself naked in his scripts, then strips them naked on the screen--literally, in the case of Ullmann and Josephson in the new film.

Saraband may be Bergman's final primal scream, which his art and craft give the severe majesty of a Bach cello suite. And now he has retired into isolation on Faro, the Baltic island where he has lived since 1966. "He sees almost no one," Ullmann says. "A lady comes in between 3 and 6 every day. She makes his food and cleans the house, and that's it. 'This is the time in my life when I'm reading,' he says. 'I'm walking on the beach and watching the sun go up and come down.' I think he doesn't miss going traveling or being on the stage or in the studio. But I think he misses the visits of the actors, talking with them, creating with them. That is the great loss he has."

His only connection to his old friends, especially Josephson and Ullmann, is the telephone. "When he talks, it's like a couple of hours," she says. "And it's so inspiring. I take a pencil in my hand, and I write down what he says. Now he's chosen to isolate himself, and I don't understand it. But I know he really means it. This is the last script, the last film."

If so, Saraband makes for a powerful and poignant final roar from the grand old man of cinema--the movies' lion king.