It’s ironic that I saw “Saraband” on Mozart’s 250th birthday. Mozart, by all accounts, was a fun-loving, giddy Catholic boy who liked carousing (lest we think of Catholicism as all dour monasticism and the word that’s always supposed to come after “repressed,” remember this is the religion that dreamed up Mardi Gras, New Orleans, and Colin Farrell). On his birthday, the radio said that there are no villains in Mozart’s operas, but that he, much like Shakespeare, understood and forgave all human frailty and weakness. We can speculate that Mozart thought of God as perpetually smiling and shaking His head, an omnipotent being who sent His only because there was no way these lovably incompetent bunglers He had created could possibly fix the mess they were in.
Yet Ingmar Bergman’s “Saraband” is through-and-through a Bach movie, and not just because Bach’s organ and cello pieces permeate it. Bach, that great, serious Lutheran, the religion of the stern, cold Swedes, the stars of Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” who stare out cold windows into white landscapes muttering monotonously to themselves before going out to shovel snow. Bach, the man who cloistered himself in the wilderness behind his organ, whose religious music isn’t judgmental or gloomy so much as mathematical, precise, and inevitable. Think of “Toccata and Fugue in D minor”—every pitch is the right pitch because, once we hear the notes before it, we realize nothing else can come next. This note and only this note fits in the sequence. It is as inevitable and inescapable as death. The house always wins. I like to think of myself as being more similar to Mozart in temperament, but I’m more often in the mood for the music of Bach.
It’s appropriate to ramble about religion and music because Bergman’s movies tend to have a religious feel to them, even if he and his characters have lost or are troubled by faith. Bergman is a religious person’s agnostic, because like so many religious who feel God and an afterlife in their bones and not by using their intellect, Bergman cannot find Divine certainty deep down inside him. He does not pride himself on his unbelief, but as his movies always tackle the Big Questions (which, now that he is 84, have become the Big Inevitables) he seems to mourn what he’s missing. But he doesn’t want to believe just because doing so would feel good (there’s an effective scene about this with Mark Ruffalo in “You Can Count on Me”).
And so, in “Saraband”—named for a stately Baroque dance from the days of Bach, in which men and women in wigs doubtlessly moved about with superhuman posture while never really touching each other—we rejoin Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson). When last we saw them they were the protagonists of Bergman’s ‘70s masterpiece “Scenes from a Marriage,” a 6 hour film that I tried to review but couldn’t find it in me. She is now 63 and he is 86. She looks remarkably good for 63, and his face looks like it’s about to melt like at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” They are still divorced, in fact haven’t seen each other in three decades. That’s an entire lifetime.
These are two perfectly realized characters, absolute individuals, yet all Bergman movies have a touch of the unreal to them. Johan and Marianne encapsulate so much that is Man and so much that is Woman. She has the woman’s ability to adapt to anything and yet remain somehow stubborn. He has the man’s lifelong adoration of self-pity, of longing for great things just so that longing can be stymied.
What happens to them…you know what, I didn’t know what was going to happen at the end of the first act of “Saraband,” so why should you? The movie begins like just another episode of “Scenes from a Marriage,” with these two people using their voices to paint great pictures of lives together, apart, fulfilled, and thwarted. And then a strange thing happens 20 minutes in—out of the ordinary if you remember “Scenes from a Marriage”—and we realize that in their later years Marianne and Johan, like many older people, have become extroverted because…well, I’m not that old, I don’t know why…
We’re not sure if anything is actually resolved at the end of this middle section of the film. Is the middle section simply a way to project how we can’t solve every problem before the clock runs out? Does the entire middle section exist just so Marianne and Johan have a crisis that they aren’t able to repair before the end of the film, so they have to run to each other?
Like many Bergman movies, we never feel like characters are just sitting and talking, even though that’s basically what they’re doing, because everything feels so…so…so much like a Bergman movie. The DVD extras include a “Making of” featurette that is, remarkably, quite interesting, showing how every location—the house, the cottage, the church, even part of the forest—is a set with removable walls and hidden spaces under the floor. It suddenly occurs to me that Bergman cinematizes what it’s like to read a good novel. Most adaptations feel incomplete, as if they’re enamored with how great books are and are merely using the “lesser” art of movies to describe that greatness. They shoot themselves in the foot by capturing the events of a book but not the feel of those twisting and turning internal byways.
Bergman creates the internal personal universe of a novel, not in the dry, incomplete, “reading-aloud-to-you” way of a Merchant-Ivory film. In the same way Tarkovsky can put a dream inside your head without feeling like he’s telling you about a dream he had, Bergman can stuff a novel inside your head without feeling like he’s describing to you an experience that you cannot have. We feel like we are experiencing the thing itself instead of hearing about a facsimile of that thing, the facsimile being the Merchant-Ivory movie that is telling what a good novel this is, and that movies are too puny to capture, and you should go read it after the movie is done.
“Saraband” may be gloomy-doom death in the air, but it presents a single human relationship as possessing a lifelong fascination, and it presents two old people pushed up against each other in bed to keep the fear out. We’ll still lose when fighting off death together, but at least it’s better than fighting off death alone. My only complaint is that there isn’t four more hours of “Saraband,” like “Scenes from a Marriage,” but I guess it’s not fair of me to expect so much work out of all these geezers. | | |
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