Saraband (2005)

Dir. Ingmar Bergman
Writ. Ingmar Bergman
w/ Liv Ullman, Erland Josephson, Börje Ahlstedt, Julia Dufvenius

When Lawrence Kasdan sat to edit the funeral ensemble The Big Chill, he became increasingly aware that the film's impact would be breached if he kept the deceased's living flashbacks in the cut. Upon completion, all shots of Kevin Costner had been removed, leaving only the telltale hairline that more attentive devoteés would recognize in later years. It also hauntingly retained a sense of the unknown, the unforeseeable, and muted and simultaneously strengthened the piece's ghosted legacy.

Bergman attributes the idea to Alf Sjöberg, Sweden's greatest filmmaker until his own career unfolded after writing Hets (Torment/Frenzy) for him. "What is half-hidden," Sjöberg told his young protégé, "is far more suggestive, more seductive, more exciting than what is fully visible." The theory rules the prevailing body of Bergman's work; but, in Saraband, he brandishes it with a tangible relish, relating each character's life to the death of one woman in the past.

Considering the story material, the decision to abandon the rule governing actors eyeing the camera creates a unique relationship between the audience and seasoned veteran Liv Ullman as divorce lawyer Marianne. She confides to the viewer her skepticism comingled with her desire to visit her former husband, even as she's approaching the final steps to his sun-basking side after decades of separation. What follows is the great echo of youth in a grouchy maturity, as the two rediscover each other. In their halcyon reunion scene, Marianne brings up his cranky days at university, which Johan dismisses, admitting that he'd been "gummed up in the standard academic nonsense," but that everything had changed when he received his honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan. Later, she tells him that he's like some "forgotten character in a stupid, old film."

Both jests display Bergman's deft humor at work.

Bereft of the daughters she had with Johan -- one lives in Australia, the other vegetates in a home -- Marianne opens maternally to the last generation, the young cellist, Karin. The fast bond with Johan's motherless granddaughter from his first marriage proves life-changing as, two years prior, the girl's mother died and left an inconsolable and vulnerable widower alone with her. Fogged and disadvantaged, Karin has found herself in a sexual imbroglio with her father. Marianne's simple ear provides the necessary candlepower for the girl to make a cathartic move that offsets the lives of her father and grandfather. Thus the two men have lost the common thread -- the girl's mother -- and in so doing, the stage has been set for what storytellers the world over refer to as "the thing."

Using vignetted narrative, woven together as classical movements, Bergman carefully develops this portrait of some of the most brittle family relations ever to get caught on film. Grudges and death have demanded more tensile strength of these characters than any of them had to give, but for one who died. In the Swede's native tongue, he gave this her name, that of his mother: Anna.

What the world has been given, at the end, is hope. Realism provides the backdrop for Bergman's final adieu to the silver screen, but hope drives it home. Whether you remember this as a parting gift to generations of admirers and enthusiasts or as a simple love sonnet to a wife one filmmaker fears he may never see again, you may rest satisfied that you are in the hands of a very wise man who has lived a full life and knows what it is to love.

Sommarnattens Leende (1955)

Dir. Ingmar Bergman
Writ. Ingmar Bergman
w/ Eva Dahlbeck, Ulla Jacobsson, Harriet Andersson, Margit Carlqvist, Gunnar Björnstrand


Bergman is at his wiliest in this fantastic romp -- fantastic in the sense that the inner lives of his women take precedence over the somewhat more prosaic (though no less funny) roles of the men, a contrasty juxtaposition that sheds ample light. He opens on the aging but trim Mr. Egerman, a man of fairly decent reputation with an Achilles heel. He has married a woman he admires who is much too young for him and all but spurned an old flame, whose name he can't seem to help but calling out while clutching his own poor wife's breast in his sleep. He can't start back up with his old lover because she is now mistress to a very possessive military man, and it could get him killed. His only comfort is his work and the quiet of his study, but in the meantime, his son Henrik has fallen in love with the beautiful Anne Egerman and has become quite the moody little clergyman, flirting with the housemaid in an effort to quell his rampant and overpowering emotions. This is perhaps the man's only relief, so that he needn't check on his wife and son every hour that he can spare...for Anne Egerman is still chaste, and he wouldn't want to wait in vain. [1]

Bergman appears to be making a lot of clipped statements at once, using his own subtle sense of humor in melodrama and just wonderful sets and costumes. There are it seems, in the society of the well-to-do in 1950s Sweden, a few rules. Unless you are drinking wine, you must be served a drink which will require a spoon, be this some sort of ade (which would be served in the day time) or a nightcap. Also, if you happen to have a wife and a mistress and can't decide which to be jealous of more, you will be subject to arrangements made by the two of them without your knowledge to discover the truth of the matter, which is the secondary plot.

Egerman faces off with his would-be rival in a retreat at his old lover's family estate, where unhappy (or idle) women are making sure that there will be trouble as they try to tamper with love and honor for lovely and honorable reasons. Leave it to Bergman. While this all sounds very soap opera-esque, his treatment of the subject matter has depth, great insight, and textures that range from squeaky-dry dialogue lines to the poetry of wine-drunk love-making at dawn. Anne Egerman, as the central figure, is a precocious homemaker full of whimsy and unrealized dreams, which make her both enchanting and a little bit useless at the regimental running of a great house. Being more like a guest in her own home provides the perfect time and atmosphere in which she and Henrik find each other.

There's something of the "life goes on" quality here, applied with wit, that is not so much dark as it is strict. While a great many dramas are being created by the restless and unfaithful, there will still always be a great need for people to try the great experiment that is marriage, as exemplified by the housemaid who is so busy trying to catch a man that she hardly notices the turmoil going on around her.

You can keep a straight face for as long as you like, but you will laugh whether you like it or not. Bergman wouldn't hear of it otherwise.

[1] Even if you find the subject matter a bit Victorian, you'd have to agree this is a brilliant set-up, and a nice contrast to his later, moodier works, I think.

Persona (1966)

One persona, one persona non grata...
Camera work alone propels the basis of this study of psychological escapism. Liv Ullman delivers an eerie actress who will not talk after freezing on stage -- a paralysis, it seems, that was brought on by the sudden impulse to laugh. With a script exercising its every right to pure minimalism and swaths of high-key lighting to give the images a ghosting, reality-bending quality, Persona deserves that attention be paid to its every detail, to every last word.
Bergman infuses bits of his own traumatic childhood into the film by encapsulating the story with the waking nightmare of a young boy. Haunted by elliptical dreams, the boy sits up in bed and tries to focus on the face projected on the wall in front of him. He reaches for the image, perhaps trying to bring it into focus, but the face keeps changing. In the tradition of pure study, the director invites us to wonder, but at no time are we allowed to feel sorry for any of the characters involved.
Bergman jumps right in. Sister Alma (Bibi Andersson) takes the dumb-struck Mrs. Vogel under her wing immediately. The hospice supervisor explains the actress' need for silence and at her suggestion patient and nurse go to her summer house on the shore to get away while Mrs. Vogel awaits a time she'll feel like speaking again. Before long, the nurse has begun to spill secrets that had been kept in too long and shares a fast intimacy with her ward. A genuine bond develops seemingly overnight by breaking the silence. Doubt soon gives way to anger, though, when she discovers a letter in which the actress purports to be studying her nurse. Livid, Alma confronts the actress and demands that she speak; threatening her with scalding water brings her out of her acute belligerence.
What follows deals with the brain's tendency to trick itself into seeing things that don't exist, and the effort required to correct the detouring process. He sheds a harsh light on this particular subject matter, not allowing much leeway for spiritual concerns to take precedence over logic, even though not everything in life can be explained. What Bergman seems most interested in toying with is the idea of an identity crisis as a source of inexplicable superiority over the life and life choices of a growing boy. If anybody in the film were to be considered sympathetic, it would be the boy, but Bergman doesn't seem to want to make himself (or even the most distant projection of his boyhood) pitiable onscreen, no matter how many times his parents locked him in a closet over dogma.
The film cruxes while Alma and Mrs. Vogel sit opposite one another at a table and Alma painstakingly recounts the intimate events of her patient's pregnancy and delivery. The scene is shot twice so that Liv can react to the dialogue in a close shot and then the nurse can be viewed repeating the same lines in a similar shot. The sense of the thing becomes clearer when Mr. Vogel shows up and spoils it: there is only one woman at the seaside cottage. What can then perceived are the final death throes of a debilitating facade that must go away before a real equilibrium can be restored.