Word: sarabands
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...first few minutes of Saraband, certain viewers will slip instantly into the world of Ingmar Bergman. The immediate clue is the presence of two familiar actors, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, stalwarts of the Swedish writer-director's informal repertory troupe. Here they are revisiting the roles they played in the 1972 Scenes from a Marriage, to which the new work is not so much a sequel as a descendant. There are also echoes of a dozen or more of Bergman's despairing, exhilarating films. The old themes nudge you: death, and those who aspire to it; love...
Sensible, sixtyish Marianne (Liv Ullmann) is getting exasperated with her cranky, octogenarian ex-husband Johan (Erland Josephson). "Sometimes," she says, "you act like a forgotten character from some stupid old film." That moment in Ingmar Bergman's new film Saraband will stir recollections in viewers who are Marianne's age--or maybe Johan's--since the two characters and the same actors appeared three decades ago in Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. But to the majority of 'plex patrons, it is the Swedish filmmaker who is the forgotten...
...lion has roared back to life with one last sublime work. Saraband, the first film Bergman has directed for theatrical release in 20 years (he announced his retirement after Fanny), is a chamber piece: four characters, 10 dialogues. Yet Bergman, who turns 87 this month, gives the story such vigor and rigor, so much emotional bile and spilled blood, that it would shame a much younger director. Here is no mild afterthought to which a critic nods indulgently. This is a testament of love and anguish from the man who used to be called the greatest living filmmaker. Well, dammit...
...pursued self-implosion, with TV documentaries and books their detonators of choice. In Los Angeles two separate juries could not agree on a verdict in the trials of Lyle and Erik Menendez, young men who admitted killing their parents, at close range, with shotguns. The nightly news became a saraband of sleaze: Tonya, Lorena, Michael, O.J.; after 10 days of claiming to have been the victim of a carjacking, a South Carolina mother confessed she pushed the vehicle into a lake with her two tiny sons strapped inside...
...with the rococo delaying tactics of the North Koreans that he asked Washington for permission "to employ such language and methods at the talks as these treacherous savages cannot fail to understand, and understanding, respect." He was turned down. Getting an armistice took two more years of an excruciating saraband between envoys who may have loathed each other but had too much to lose to get mad. Now American and North Korean diplomats are in the trenches again, speaking tactfully on matters of life and death, as Washington tries to stop Pyongyang's apparent march toward building an atomic bomb...