Saraband (2005)

Image credit: Saraband:Bengt Wanselius

WON'T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? Ingmar Bergman returns to the Scenes of his '70s triumph

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Turning to the camera, Liv Ullmann crinkles her warm oval face into a smile, once again taking on the role of Marianne from 1974's Scenes From a Marriage. For art-movie lovers of a certain age, it's like gazing at an image out of your own memory scrapbook. In Saraband, Ingmar Bergman reunites Ullmann and Erland Josephson as Marianne and Johan, the loving and raging couple whose marriage and divorce came to seem, in the '70s, an incarnation of the bourgeois domestic spirit. Anyone expecting a tender sunset elegy, however, has wandered into the wrong film. Saraband, despite a few wistful moments, is a poison pill of a reunion. It's set in a tranquil mountain cabin, where Marianne arrives to visit Johan after a separation of 30 years. She discovers that he has devolved into a ghastly crank who specializes in tormenting his now-aging son (from a different marriage). As Marianne becomes a bystander to his cruelty, you feel the pull of Bergman's craft, but also the sting of his sourness.