Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.
A sequel of sorts to 1973’s Scenes From A Marriage, Saraband catches up with “emotional illiterates” Marianne (Liv) and Johan (Erland )30 years on. In Scenes, we tracked 10 years of their marriage: blissful pleasantries to sexual breakdown to acid truths to hostile divorce, the pair continuing to fuck and rant even after they’d both remarried. Saraband similarly deals with confusion, anguish, shame, destruction, loneliness and despair. Made at the age of 85, 20 years after Bergman announced his retirement with Fanny And Alexander, it also adds one vital card to the pack: Death.
That its shadow trails the aged Marianne and Johan as they again cough up souls is a given. But, significantly, it also haunts Bergman himself, the Swedish auteur using a picture of his own dead wife to stand in for a photo of the recently deceased Anna, Henrik’s (Ahlstedt) wife and Karin’s (Dufvenius) mother. Its spectre is also there in the fact that Saraband doesn’t boast the expert precision of the director’s ’50s, ’60s and ’70s output, the odd flutter of arrhythmic editing causing the film to hitch and gurgle. And yet, paradoxically, the flaws only add to the poignancy: they announce the fading powers of a master filmmaker as he prepares for his very own dance with Death.
Love, loss and loathing. Not one of Bergman's customary masterpieces but a fitting curtain-call to a blistering career.
