Last Roar From a Legend

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Bergman's influence was matched only by his energy. He had enough to direct a full load of plays for nine months a year, then shoot a movie masterpiece on his summer vacation; enough to exhaust five wives and many mistresses, including some of the leading actresses who so brilliantly glamorized his films. His early-'50s liaison with Harriet Andersson stoked a smoldering sexuality in Summer with Monika and The Naked Night. Then Bergman took up with Bibi Andersson, who embodied a breezy blond life force penetrating the darkness of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.

Ullmann was one of those muses. She moved in with the director 40 years ago during the making of Persona and starred in eight more Bergman films in the next dozen years. (Their daughter Linn is now a novelist.) Ullmann had not appeared in one of his works since Autumn Sonata in 1978, though she directed two of his late scripts, Private Confessions and Faithless. It was that last project, in which Josephson starred, that spurred Saraband. "When Erland and I did Faithless, we made a kind of goof version of Scenes from a Marriage just for fun, showing that Marianne and Johan were now old and really gaga," says Ullmann. "I sent the tape to Ingmar, and he loved it. And later he said, 'You know, I am writing something about Marianne and Johan.'"

Bergman had entrusted other scripts during his post-director phase to Ullmann and Bille August (The Best Intentions). Those stories were about Bergman's parents. This one would be, metaphorically but unsparingly, about himself and his children. That, Ullmann believes, is the reason he chose to direct Saraband himself. "The story was so personal," she says, "only he could make it into a film. Also, I think, it was tempting for him to work with some of his favorite actors one more time and to go into the studio one more time."

Saraband--which Bergman shot on digital video and will play in theaters only in that format--is not really a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage. It uses the familiar figures from the earlier film to explore new relationships: Johan's with his son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and Henrik's with his teenage daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius). All three have been handicapped by desolation over the death of Henrik's much loved wife Anna. Henrik, a failed musician, has transferred his ambition to Karin, a promising cellist. When Anna was alive, Henrik was lost in love with Anna. Now Karin is all he has. His ardor, as two startling scenes indicate, is at least emotionally incestuous.

With the same intensity, Henrik loathes his cold-fish father. Johan is equally venomous, telling his son, "If you didn't have Karin, who, thank God, takes after her mother, you wouldn't exist for me at all." But behind his contempt is the ache of envy. Johan, whom Marianne describes as "notoriously and compulsively unfaithful" and who never came within shouting distance of marital bliss, finds it "incomprehensible that Henrik was given the privilege of loving Anna and that she loved him."