Saraband

By now Ingmar Bergman has concocted many a postscript to his illustrious career. What makes this masterful if sprawling 2003 sequel to Scenes From a Marriage (1973) remarkable is that at the director’s insistence it was shot and is being shown on digital video. This matters because, in spite of Bergman’s consummate skill with his actors (chiefly Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson), he makes no attempt whatever to hide his contempt for the medium apart from its usefulness as a recording device. The lack of stylistic finesse that results, whether deliberate or inadvertent, becomes a kind of shocking honesty about the creepiness of Bergman’s sensibility: solipsistically self-pitying, spiritually constipated, and utterly without interest in overcoming these flaws. R, 120 min. In Swedish with subtitles. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Music Box.

This entry was posted in Featured Texts. Bookmark the permalink.