Copyright American Labor Conference on International Affairs Jul/Aug 2005Studies in Restraint and Excess
INGMAR BERGMAN's Sarabandhad its American debut last October at the New York Film Festival, and opened quietly in early July at two Manhattan theaters. That Friday the New York Times Arts section featured the arrival of the superhero movie Fantastic Four, while the cover of the Village Voice touted a festival devoted to actor Johnny Depp. Only Time magazine's two-page spread did not shuffle Saraband among the many minor movies opening that week. Small matter that it has been announced as the final statement by the world's greatest living film director, or that it is the first Bergman picture to receive even a limited U.S. release since After the Rehearsal in 1984.
Saraband, a sequel to his ground-breaking 1973 television series Scenes from a Marriage, is the only Bergman film to bring together Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson and Börje Ahlstedt-three of the four actors who have filled his most memorable roles since Max von Sydow left the stock company in the early 1970s. (The fourth, Pernilla August, does not appear.) Bergman started directing in the mid-1940s, but most date his mature period from 1953's The Naked Night. Completed in 2003, Saraband caps a period of productivity longer than that of any other major filmmaker.
All this ought to have been sufficient to generate more buzz for Saraband than it has received, even if it were not the masterpiece it is. Made on a modest budget, shot in HDTV with a small cast, it is one of the most powerfully cinematic, intellectually dazzling and emotionally overwhelming new films you are likely to see.
The plot is deceptively simple. Thirty years after the events ofScenes from a Marriage, Marianne (Ullmann) decides to pay a visit to her ex-husband Johan (Josephson), who has inherited a great deal of money. secluded in a country estate, Johan sees almost no one, not even Henrik (Ahlstedt), his son from a previous marriage, or Karin (Julia DufVenius), Henrik's daughter, who live in a cottage on his land.
Marianne finds the three still mourning the loss of Henrik's wife Anna, who died two years earlier. At several key moments, Bergman cuts to her photograph, and the silent woman functions like an additional character. Johan adored Anna and was jealous of her affection for Henrik. Her presence only intensified the mutual hatred between father and son, which dates from Henrik's early childhood and has festered to the point that the two men can barely stand to be in the same room. Recognizing her father's loneliness and estrangement, Karin tries to shield him from self-pity by taking Anna's place in the household, even sharing his bed.
Henrik, a professor of music and orchestra conductor whose surly manner is costing him his job, plans to continue dominating Karin, a talented cellist, by supervising her career as a soloist. Johan, sure Henrik is steering the girl toward mediocrity in order to keep her by his side, offers to send her abroad for her education, removing her from her father and putting her in his debt.
A contest between two mentors to control the destiny of a young woman is a common dramatic device, but what animates Saraband is the brutal honesty of its probing into the motivations and passions of the four principal figures. Bergman and his accomplished cast convey layers of meaning in an instant. Complex expressions and gestures are captured by a camera that remains harshly close to the actors. The film has a physical and emotional credibility unusual today.
Bergman is the only director who can make us feel we are intruding upon the privacy of real people when we witness intimate conversations on screen. It can be discomfiting to be confronted with weaknesses these individuals would never allow strangers to glimpse. His films remind us of cinema's potential to recreate humanity's lowest depths as well as its lightest charms.
Marianne is a successful lawyer who speaks wisely and comfortingly. She visits Johan because she has failed to come to terms with past hardships-divorces, estrangement from her chi ldren, her growing loneliness. Johan, who in Scenes from a Marriage had difficulty registering tenderness, seems to have hardened further. At one point he is discovered listening to classical music at high volume with his body crouched over the speakers-the only way he can feel its power.
| [Photograph] |
| INGMAR BERGMAN |
The suffering Henrik tries to maintain a veneer of invulnerability like his father's but repeatedly erupts into rage. Karin is more willing than the others to talk about the course of her life and receive advice, but she cannot articulate the extent to which she has surrendered herself to Henrik. Nor is she able to convince Johan and Marianne that without her he will destroy himself.
Bergman's microscopic investigations leave room for the unexpected. Viewers who recall the brutal interchanges between Johan and Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage will be surprised at the harmony of their conversations. Saraband is notable for its focus on the lives of the middle-aged and the elderly-Marianne is in her 60s and Johan in his 80s. The divorced couple have a lifetime of experience behind them, but they concentrate on the present and agree not to discuss their past travails. As a result, while they are comfortable together, they have no hope of honest reconciliation. Even at the remarkable climax, when the wounded pair strip naked before the camera and climb into bed together, they lie like intimate strangers, physically close but emotionally distant.
Bergman practices an uncharacteristic degree of formal restraint. Limiting himself to four main characters, he divides the film into 10 scenes framed by a Prologue and an Epilogue (where only Marianne and a minor character appear). During the bookend passages, Marianne sits amid a pile of photographs and addresses the camera directly. The scenes consist of dialogues between two of the performers, so that by the end all four have played at least one duet with each of the others.
Several scenes open with someone involved in a cultural activity-cooking a meal, reading Kierkegaard, listening to Bach-and end with a stunning burst of white light. At one point, Henrik memorably knocks a lamp offhis father's desk, pulling it out of its socket and causing a flare that fills the screen before the black-out. Such touches consistently further Bergman's psychological aims.
Saraband is also a profoundly personal work: Each of the four characters represents an aspect of Bergman. Since Fanny and Alexander ( 1982), when he began to make films for television exclusively, he has been adapting stories from his family history. The unj ustly obscure In the Presence of a Clown ( 1997), as well as several Bergman screenplays directed by others, narrated the experiences of his grandparents, parents and himself in his youth.
With Faithless (2000)-directed, like Private Confessions (1996), by Ullmann-he extended his autobiographical project: An elderly artist (Josephson, a clear surrogate for Bergman) looks back on a love affair and attempts to make sense of the encounter by reimagining it as fiction.
Marianne plays a similar role in the Prologue and Epilogue of Saraband, sorting through a mass of photographs she cannot possibly possess. These scenes occur not in a real room but in the store-house of her imagination, where she tries to give shape-as Bergman does through film-to its mess.
The other figures are surrogates as well. Johan comes closest to Bergman in the temperament of his latter days: He lives in seclusion, visited daily only by a housekeeper, carrying on most of his social life over the telephone. In Henrik's case, Bergman identifies with the anger and cowardice-both the subjects of many of his works. And Karin's ultimate choice to become a member of an orchestra rather than a soloist echoes Bergman's writings on film and the appeal of its collaborative nature.
Saraband's power may indeed derive from the acute closeness Bergman feels to each character. Like any great work, the movie defies prosaic description. Viewers willing to approach it with the patience it deserves will not mistake the seriousness of its subject matter for a mere exercise in Nordic gloom. Even while acknowledging the limitations of its crotchety characters, it is suffused with the joy of living. Its women, in particular, reach optimistically toward happiness and personal freedom.
ONE OF the pleasures of Saraband is the way the director justifies his surprises. Despite excursions into the surreal, its drama is entirely credible. With the summer's headlining action films, we descend from the sublime to the nonsensical. War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg's revision of H.G. Wells' apocalyptic novel, and Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, a new look at the comic book icon, toy with important issues but their inconsistencies insult audiences.
Spielberg's film is the better of the two. Its alien invasion scenes terrifyingly evoke the horror of modern warfare: Crowds run from the airships and tanks of an unconquerable enemy; refugees in endless lines become consumed by the instinct for self-preservation and turn on one another. In this respect at least, War of the Worlds is the most substantial work Spielberg has produced since Saving Private Ryan (1998).
By contrast Nolan, director of the overrated Memento (2000) and the American remake of Insomnia (2002), stumbles in his first attempt at a movie on a large scale. Practically every cut produces an error in continuity. The fight scenes are perhaps the most confused ever done. Early on, when millionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) treks up a wintry mountain, each shot shows snow falling at a different rate.
The film's preachy script is also unintelligible. Wayne becomes Batman under the tutelage of butler Alfred (Michael Caine), girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), lab worker Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and nemesis Ra 's Al Ghul (Liam Neeson). As he grows into his critnefighting role, he claims to be pursuing what is beneficial for Gotham City. But he never makes up his mind about whether he is a vigilante seeking justice in a corrupt world or a law-abiding figure working in tandem with the community.
In one particularly frustrating moment, he boards a train and derails it, pinning Ra's inside. Before he leaps to safety, he explains to Ra's that while he does not intend to kill him, he will not save him either, as if this statement absolves him from guilt in committing the sort of cold-blooded vengeance practiced by his foe.
Nolan and Spielberg share contempt for the intellect of the heroes of their source material. The protagonist of Wells War of the Worlds and the Batman envisioned by creator Bob Kane are accomplished scientists. Wells' narrator, who copes with a Martian invasion, studies their methods and habits and explains them to the reader. Spielberg nixes this character and superimposes a story he has told in more than half his films-from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) to The Terminal (2004)-about a dysfunctional deadbeat rising to heroism in a time of crisis.
The horror of an alien invasion is the backdrop for the trite narrative of Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), an irresponsible father forced to risk his life for his alienated children, Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie (Justin Chatwin). Spielberg and screenwriters Josh Friedman and David Koepp quickly establish Ray as distant and aggressive, Robbie as rebellious and Rachel as unusually sensible, then steer the rest of our attention toward the crisis.
The suffering Spielberg depicts so frighteningly highlights a story of male empowerment. The pairing nearly suggests that the mass carnage was worth the salvation of one man's soul. The film becomes just one more tale of a secular prodigal son acting out the warped notion of redemption that colors much of Spielberg's work.
As FOR BATMAN, in the comics it is his intelligence that distinguishes him from other superheroes and makes him one of the healthiest pop fantasy creations. He becomes a crimefighter through study and discipline, not because he is an alien with special powers or because he was pelted by gamma rays. Devastated by a street thug's senseless murder of his parents, he is a self-made hero, learning to fight on his own, inventing a line of marvelous gadgets to aid him in his work.
Nolan's Batman is an egotistical simpleton. Wallowing in self-pity after being orphaned, he becomes a criminal himself. He learns to fight brilliantly only when Ra's notices his potential and trains him to be part of a terrorist force. Upon returning to Gotham City, he gives Alfred the responsibility of constructing the Bat Cave and Fox the duty of stocking it with hardware. In one of the most disheartening moments in Batman Begins, as Fox tries to explain how one of his devices works, Bruce blinks stupidly and asks him to repeat himself in plain English. Nolan tramples on the Batman legend for the sake of a trite gag.
Bruce is left with nothing but his muscular body and his enormous fortune, which Nolan, in the spirit of the modern age, multiplies many times over. The Wayne millions were peripheral to the original Batman myth; they merely explained how he could afford Batman's gadgetry and allowed him to hide his true identity by pretending to be a playboy. But Nolan, who reminds us of Wayne's wealth in almost every scene, rejects the comic book assertion that anyone can be a hero and implies that superpowers are available for purchase only to the elite.
Batman and War of the Worlds both make superficial and contradictory references to the evils of modern warfare. Batman's villains are members of a terrorist cell bent on wiping out Gotham City. Nolan, however, never explains how Ra's, a European, came to lead a league of Asian terrorists, or why he wants to strike against the West. Nor are we enlightened about what he believes his plan-to douse the city in a poisonous mist, causing its citizens to run amok-will accomplish, besides making Gotham more of a cesspool than it already is. Nolan conjures the specter of terrorism only to trivialize it.
Spielberg defuses any analogy to real events by adding absurd details to Wells' story. In the director's version, the aliens buried their ships a few feet below the earth millions of years before life sprung upon it, but humans never discovered them. Wells imagined his Martians as space vampires feeding off human blood, though they took over London mostly by gassing it. Spielberg's invaders also thrive on our blood, but they spend the first half of the film wiping out much larger portions of humanity than Wells ever imagined with enormous death rays-which seems counterproductive.
Spielberg and Nolan prove guilty of a charge too often pinned on Bergman: excess gravity. They announce their portentousness in every frame. Since they are not adept enough to invent credible imaginary worlds, and they neuter any suggestion of contemporary relevance, the least they could do is provide us with a little humor. A lightness of touch might lead a viewer to respond more forgivingly to the inconsistencies in their structures and the emptiness of their politics.