Bergman's final flourish

Everything one admires about Ingmar Bergman - and almost everything one doubts too - is contained in this final cinematic flourish in which the couple from his previous Scenes from a Marriage (1973) meet again after some 30 years.

The 87-year-old director lays a superbly clammy hand on the difficulties of relationships, and his deceptively simple style has an almost hypnotic effect. Saraband is also deeply pessimistic and full of the kind of deadly Swedish angst that Monty Python once parodied.

Great directors, however, somehow transcend their failings, as Bergman does here. This is a film with a hundred subtleties masked by what looks like a comparatively simple story.

Liv Ullmann is the ex-wife who visits her former husband (Erland Josephson) deep in the countryside. She finds that he's lost touch with his daughters, and despises his son (Börje Ahlstedt). The son, a professor of music, who
lives nearby with his beloved but stifled daughter (Julia Dufvenius), is grieving for his dead wife, the only member of the family they all loved.

This unhappy quartet circle around one another with Bergman's astonishing ability to prick the skin of their outward civilities and discover the worm in the bud underneath. The freshest performance comes from Dufvenius as the cellist daughter quietly trying to get away from home to pursue her promising musical career.

Saraband was made for television in 2003 but is finally now brought to the cinema despite Bergman's doubts. It is, in one way, a final summing up of the great film-maker's art and in another a lesson to other directors that simplicity of expression can produce extraordinary results. You could say it is Bergman's final feelbad film.

Saraband
Cert: 15