Competition
Sight & Sound is pleased to be able to give readers the chance to win copies of all 26 DVDs in Tartan Video's Bergman collection.
Ingmar Bergman conceived Saraband as a sequel of sorts to Scenes from a Marriage: it reunites characters and cast members from the 1973 film about a failing relationship. Saraband was also intended as the Swedish director's swansong: 85 when he completed it in 2004, Bergman declared that it would be his last film.
Divided into 12 self-contained episodes, the film revolves around the couple who divorced in Scenes from a Marriage. After a long time apart, sixtysomething Marianne (Liv Ullmann) pays a visit to ex-husband Johan (Erland Josephson), who is spending his final years in rural isolation with his widowed son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and talented cellist granddaughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius).
The film suggests with deft authority how the intense relationship between Marianne and Johan has dimmed into a kind of courtly tenderness. But the main focus is on the poisoned dynamic between Johan, a hugely admired but very private artist (not unlike Bergman himself), and the far less successful Henrik. As the two men wrestle over the paternal control of Karin, Saraband builds into an unsparingly bleak portrait of old age, the disappointments of parenthood and the crushing expectations placed on sons by powerful fathers.
The performances are masterly. As ever, Bergman's clean and watchful camerawork makes the most of his actors' expressive faces: those of Ullmann and Josephson, lined and careworn by the 30 years that have passed since Scenes from a Marriage, are especially poignant. Austere and emotionally devastating, owing something to Bergman's great idol August Strindberg in its savage view of family relations, the film shows Bergman has not softened with age. It is a fitting end to one of cinema's greatest bodies of work.
Saraband is released on DVD by Tartan Video on 27 March, priced £19.99, together with After the Rehearsal, Bergman's 1983 study of the relationship between an ageing theatre director and a younger actress. You can win both titles as part of a complete set of Bergman DVDs in Sight & Sound's exclusive competition (see below). Saraband is available to buy from MovieMail.