Last Roar From a Legend

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Ibsen's Ghosts was the last play Bergman directed before retiring from the stage in 2002, and Saraband is a virtual ghost sonata. The most palpable specter is Anna, whose death has sapped much of the life from her survivors. (Bergman dedicated the film to Ingrid von Rosen, who married him in 1971 and died in 1995.) There are other hints of ghosts in doors that mysteriously slam shut and in the sunlight that bursts like a visual organ chord through the windows of a village church. But Saraband is also haunted by the ghosts of Bergman films past--not just the fractured family lives in Scenes from a Marriage, Through a Glass Darkly and Autumn Sonata but also the spareness of landscape and acuity of pain in Winter Light and Persona. All are surveys of the damage we do to ourselves and those we try to love.

Long ago, we may infer, Bergman made a pact not with the devil but with his art. He would be true, remorselessly faithful, to the demons he put on the screen while his children and all his women put up with his compulsive infidelities and nurtured their own resentments. He once related that he acknowledged to one of his sons, then a teenager, that he might have been a bad father, and the lad spat out, "Bad father? You've never been a father at all." The dialogue is repeated verbatim in Saraband.

Ullmann, who says the film "is very much about his relationship with his son," defends Bergman's use of private details in his public confessions. "Sometimes, if you're a genius, you have to be ruthless ... some kind of a cannibal. You have to be able to look at people, love them, recognize them, but also take from them." She recalls that in Scenes from a Marriage, Bergman showed a photo of Ullmann and her first husband--the man she deserted in 1965 to live with the filmmaker. Ullmann says that her ex "got so upset, he left the room, and he never saw the end of the movie. But I understand it; it's part of being creative." That understanding shows the trust Bergman's actors have in him. He strips himself naked in his scripts, then strips them naked on the screen--literally, in the case of Ullmann and Josephson in the new film.

Saraband may be Bergman's final primal scream, which his art and craft give the severe majesty of a Bach cello suite. And now he has retired into isolation on Faro, the Baltic island where he has lived since 1966. "He sees almost no one," Ullmann says. "A lady comes in between 3 and 6 every day. She makes his food and cleans the house, and that's it. 'This is the time in my life when I'm reading,' he says. 'I'm walking on the beach and watching the sun go up and come down.' I think he doesn't miss going traveling or being on the stage or in the studio. But I think he misses the visits of the actors, talking with them, creating with them. That is the great loss he has."

His only connection to his old friends, especially Josephson and Ullmann, is the telephone. "When he talks, it's like a couple of hours," she says. "And it's so inspiring. I take a pencil in my hand, and I write down what he says. Now he's chosen to isolate himself, and I don't understand it. But I know he really means it. This is the last script, the last film."

If so, Saraband makes for a powerful and poignant final roar from the grand old man of cinema--the movies' lion king.