Saraband movie review & film summary (2005)
Now there is no more reassurance to be had. They must be in their 80s now; in real life, Josephson is 81 and Ullmann 65. Because Bergman's films can be seen again and again, and because he believes the human face is the most important subject of the cinema, we are as familiar with these two faces as any we have ever seen. I saw Ullmann for the first time in Bergman's "Persona" (1966), which I reviewed seven months after I became a film critic. Now here she is again. When I interviewed her about "Faithless" at Cannes five years ago, I noted to myself that she had not, like so many actresses, had plastic surgery. She wore her age as proof of having lived, as we all must. Now I see "Saraband" and the movie is possible because she did not allow a surgeon to give her a face yearning for its younger form.
As the film opens, she is looking through some old photographs. Marianne and Johan had two daughters together, who are now middle-aged. She never sees them; one lives in Australia, and the other has gone mad. She tells us she has not seen Johan for all of those years, but now thinks she will go to visit him. We follow her, and find that Johan is now living in misery left over from an earlier marriage. He is rich, lives in the country, owns a nearby cottage, which is occupied by his 61-year-old son Henrik (Borje Ahlstedt) and Henrik's 19-year-old daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius). Anna-- Henrik's wife, Karin's mother -- has been dead for two years. She is missed because she was needed, as cartilage if nothing else, to keep her husband and daughter from wearing each other down.
They are not Marianne's problem. But she visits them, and witnesses appalling unhappiness. Johan is scornful of his son, who has value in his eyes only as the parent of Karin. Henrik is bitter that his father has money but doles it out reluctantly, to keep his son in constant need and supplication. Karin, who plays the cello, feels trapped because she wants to develop her career in the city and her father possessively hangs onto her (they sleep, Marianne discovers, in the same bed).
The movie is not about the resolution of this plot. It is about the way people persist in creating misery by placing the demands of their egos above the need for happiness -- their own happiness, and that of those around them. In some sense Johan and Henrik live in these adjacent houses, in the middle of nowhere, simply so that they can hate one another. If they parted, each would lose a reason for living. Karin is the victim of their pathology.
