Saraband (2003)

Rated R for nudity, sexuality, language, mild violence, child abuse, molestation, suicide, blood, and domestic abuse.   Ingmar Bergman, for making pretty intellectual films, does get cruel sometimes with his characters.  This is one of the more cruel films and sometimes I wonder if it absolutely needed to go this hard.  While there are long stretches of people just talking to each other, there are some pretty rough moments as well.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

He made a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage?  What?  I was not prepped for this.  When Criterion throws a second movie on the disc, it tends to be one of the forgotten films of Bergmans.  You know, for the real completionists out there, like me.  I was ready for Saraband to be another black-and-white movie about how it is okay to cheat on your spouse as long as there's love involved.  Nope, I have to go back to the world of Marianne and Johan a third time.  

But here's the kicker!  I actually really like this movie.  

It's not without it's faults.  Oh my, there's no reason for this movie to go as hard as it does.  Bergman really wants you to hate Henrik and Johan for the majority of the movie.  Okay, that's a bit of a broad stroke. He wants you to both feel sympathy for Henrik while utterly detesting him.  There.  That's the more accurate read of the character.  I refuse to dance around this.  A lot of the movie hangs on Henrik's abusive relationship with his semi-prodigy daughter.  She's a talented cello player, but not as talented as her father makes her out to be.  In a rage of frustration over her failing to meet his expectations, he hits her, forcing her to flee the house.  That's as cruel as the movie needs to be.  Part of the implication is that Henrik isn't the same man since his beloved Anna died and he's taking that rage out on his daughter.  From a storytelling perspective, that's as much as we need to consider Henrik a bad guy in the context of this story.  But the more we watch this movie and the further you get into it, we discover that he is in a sexual relationship with his daughter.  He has supplanted Anna with Karin, his daughter, and it is the most troubling hat-on-a-hat addition to the movie.

I mean, I get what Bergman is doing here.  He doesn't want to keep it subtle that Karin has become the new Anna to Henrik.  In an attempt to treat this relationship as normal, he goes against his dead wife's wishes to allow Karin to be her own advocate when it comes to her studies in music.  But because he already has a spouse in the form of his daughter, he doesn't listen to the message that his actual spouse gives him, which is as explicit as it can be.  I often criticize Bergman for his return to motifs and themes that tend to get tired, but I can't believe that I'm frustrated that he's not trying to mold a more human person into that idea that his daughter has become his spouse.  It just seems so gratuitous by the time the revelation happens.  I know.  That's me.  But what starts off as an engaging drama that's mostly talking heads having dramatic dialogues turns into something quite upsetting.  And that's where the movie doesn't really do it for me.  (Remember how I said that I liked Saraband?) This is 2003.  I don't want to imagine Ingmar Bergman as the kind of director who does exploitative things for their shock value.  But I'm watching this movie that has nudity, incest, and a graphic suicide attempt and think "This is the same guy who made The Seventh Seal."  To his credit, Bergman has made other things that can be upsetting to watch.  It just felt compacted into Saraband more than what I am used to.

But the big sell for me is that I did enjoy this movie, warts and all.  The thing about Scenes from a Marriage is that it hit on a lot of the same notes that Bergman had been playing with in terms of infidelity.  I didn't think I wanted more of Marianne and Johan because the television version just kept hitting me over the head with their toxic relationship. I still think that Marianne is a fool for having Johan in her life.  But these characters have the benefit of being both similar and different from the people we left at the end of Scenes from a Marriage.  While Johan was always a jerk in the original movie, I always felt like Bergman was giving him a pass.  Saraband, in little ways, makes Johan what I wanted him to be.  Saraband Johan is absolutely contemptable while still being loved by Marianne.  Marianne seemed to ignore Johan's crimes in the first movie, forgiving him and indulging in these toxic little moments.  In Saraband, until the end of the movie, Marianne and Johan's relationship is mostly non-sexual.  She misses her friend, even though he's terrible to her.  While I condemn the fact that she even visits him, she seems to maintain healthy boundaries with this man.  Part of that comes from the fact that he is a borderline invalid.

But the thing I really like is that we kind of deal with the consequences of a selfish life with Saraband. Johan has proven to be an awful father, something that Scenes from a Marriage addresses, but smooths the edges off of.  The children are an afterthought in Scenes from a Marriage.  But Johan's obsession with self leaves these families with generational trauma.  I love that Karin is the focus of the film, not Henrik.  Henrik is the antagonist of the film.  He's a darker version of Johan.  Like a good villain marred by trauma, Henrik confronts Johan and lays it all out for him.  He spills his hatred out and we see the almost apathetic Johan calmly reveal his disdain for his child.  The thing I love?  That's absolutely Johan. Johan has always been the selfish academic.  He's the criticism of the thing that I might fall into (if I wasn't aggressively an empathetic millennial who won't stop curling into a tiny ball when the world is unfair to others).  (Also, yes, I referred to myself as an intellectual.  I'm writing a blog about every movie I watch and this entry is me dissecting a Bergman sequel from a Criterion box. I think I have enough boxes checked to self-identify as that.) 

There is one thing that I'm still absolutely processing.  I acknowledge that I don't have all of the answers after one viewing of a challenging movie.  One of the things that the movie refers to and then, subsequently, ends on is Marianne's relationship to Martha, who has spiraled into madness.  It's addressed a few times, but it almost seems like an afterthought.  For a minute, I thought it was a way to write off a character who didn't come into play with Henrik and Karin's life.  After all, Henrik and Karin are Johan's children from yet-another-marriage.  But I think it is also easy to throw stones at Johan because he sucks so much.  This is not meant to be a condemnation of motherhood, but I think it is a condemnation of Marianne.  Marianne, in Scenes from a Marriage, mentions the children post-divorce to Johan a few times.  But often, it is in the context of needing money. I can't deny that Marianne was the one doing the work and  I don't want that to be throwing stones at her. But rarely do we have any understanding of what Marianne and Johan are putting the children through.  

My thoughts on this are complex.  There was a time that I thought that divorce was the worst thing you could do to a child. I'm the product of a marriage that stayed together, but might have potentially fallen apart had my father not died when I was young.  I don't know what going through divorce does to a kid.  My current standing on divorce is that some people absolutely should not be together and maybe divorce is the healthiest and sometimes safest response to toxic coupling.  But I also get that much of Scenes from a Marriage is about Marianne and Johan finding joy for themselves in a crappy situation and not how their actions affect others.  That's the characterization of these two specific people.  Part of that comes from the fact that the film is mostly structured as a two-hander.  We only really understand Marianne and Johan from their interactions with each other and the world passes out of sight from the audience when they aren't together.  That's not a guarantee.  We do meet other people in the course of the film, but the story is about their relationship and nothing else.

My take on the Martha scene at the end is Marianne coming to terms that Johan wasn't the only toxic element in their relationship.  Especially post Fanny and Alexander, there is that element of "out of sight; out of mind".  While Marianne mentions Martha, we don't necessarily get this wracked guilt over putting Martha in an institution.  That visit at the end is an attempt to fix the past, something that Johan seems incapable of doing.  We always bonded with Marianne because she was the victim of adultery.  But she also is the more agreeable person in that couple.  And as such, she might have more malleability when it comes to seeing her own faults.  Johan's anxiety attack and Marianne's visiting of Martha might be the same moment from two separate personalities.  Johan's anxiety attack is almost his body telling him that he's done a lifetime of evil, but his personality is not prepped to make change based on what he now views as comeuppance.  Marianne, on the other hand, is healthy enough to view her own flaws and, instead of trying to fix Johan's family, she can try fixing her own.

It's good stuff.  With the namedrop of Fanny and Alexander, I do get more Fanny and Alexander vibes.  I used to think that I liked early Bergman and tolerated middle Bergman.  But realistically, I think I like late Bergman the best.  It has that gravitas and emotional resonance that is cryptic where it needs to be and explicit where it needs to be as well.