1.76:1 DVD capture: Saraband The DVD

Sony presents Saraband on DVD in a magnificent 1.76:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. The film was shot in HiDef and projected digitally at any venue that chose to show it, but the image on this DVD is filmlike in a lot of ways, with a velvety but not unattractive patina and a conspicuous lack of grain the only telltale signs that Saraband was not originated on celluloid. Compression artifacts are nil save an instance or two of banding. As this is a dialogue-driven film, no sense getting upset about the absence of 5.1 audio, and in fact the Dolby 2.0 Surround soundtrack boasts excellent depth and stereophonic separation during the Bach selections that pipe up between "chapters." Produced for Swedish television, the 44-minute "The Making of Saraband" (onscreen title: "Directed by Bergman (I Bergmans regi)") constitutes the disc's supplementary material. At times almost embarrassingly voyeuristic, the piece gives us a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the shoot, weaving a hypnotic spell that's only occasionally broken by predictably hagiographic interviews with select cast and crew. Bergman, whose fiery intensity, seemingly undiluted by age, matches his mad-scientist countenance, treats his actors like puppets to an astonishingly literal degree, but it's hard to begrudge him his autocratic methods when he takes such pride in how well the likes of Julia Dufvenius perform once the camera's running and their proverbial training wheels are off. Highlight: Bergman's impromptu monologue on the death of his wife--an event that informed much of Saraband--during a table reading, which drives one nearby assistant to tears and will likely do the same to viewers at home. Kudos to Bergman for submitting to this twilit demystification of his legend. Note that the making-of's English subtitles are not optional. A trailer for Heights cues up on startup.-Bill Chambers

A kind-of sequel to 1973's Scenes from a Marriage, Ingmar Bergman, at the age of 85, provided Saraband for Swedish television, reuniting Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson as his doomed couple Marianne and Johan. Composed of ten monologues or dialogues (like Scenes, there's never more than a duet onscreen), the picture opens with Marianne speaking of an irresistible desire to visit her long-estranged husband at his cottage--one that he now shares with a son, Henrik, and granddaughter, Karin. Penniless cellists, they live in the guest house but descend, in the picture's one genuinely false note, to a place so unjustified and unsavoury that it's rendered useless as a metaphor. Always guilty of being stagebound and moribund, Bergman falls back on his worst instincts in Saraband, and neither is it completely redeemed by its performances. I like Josephson, but Ullman goes through the paces in high Judi Dench style: adorable, rotund, matronly, and not trying very hard.

But when Saraband works, it works based on the strength of Bergman's ironclad iconoclasm. He refuses to be conventional and thus, like ideological (if in no other way) contemporary Jean-Luc Godard, he's morphed from the shadows and light of his masterpieces into the ugly digital video gloss of their swan songs--a shift in medium that mirrors Marianne's opening monologue (addressed through the fourth wall as she sits at a table going through grainy photographs) and serves as a call to a muse perhaps best identified as a recognition that images are only ever spurs to imperfect memory. It's an old man's understanding that art is no substitute for experience, but it's also an old artist's understanding that art is the closest we can ever come to replicating it. If there's a strong sense of melancholy in Saraband, find it not in how Johan hates his son, or how Henrik loves his dead wife through his emotionally stunted daughter, but rather in how the desire to recapture the best of youth is inextricably married to the knowledge that the closest we can come is painfully inadequate. Bergman's ugliest picture, aesthetically, it's as dependent on what it says by the fact of itself as Persona or The Seventh Seal: it's a film artist turning out the lights on video. Saraband's message is its medium (at least 9/10ths of it)--and how much we should temper criticism of television when it brings us the last word from one of the cinema's most influential filmmakers is the question of the hour.-Walter Chaw

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
112 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.76:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
Swedish Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, French, Portuguese
DVD-9
Region One
Sony

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Published: March 1, 2006