Saraband

Ingmar Bergman's final film, Saraband (2003), made for Swedish television when the director was eighty-five, served as a coda to one of the greatest careers in cinema. A sequel of sorts to his 1973 Scenes from a Marriage, it reunited Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson as the long-divorced couple Marianne and Johan, thirty years on.

Structured as a series of intense two-character dialogues — its title borrowed from the Bach cello suites that recur throughout — the film centres less on the old couple than on Johan's poisonous relationship with his son and his tender bond with his granddaughter, a young cellist. Bergman shoots in unsparing digital close-up, returning one last time to the themes of a lifetime: family cruelty, the fear of death, the search for love and the silence of God. Ullmann anchors it with grave compassion.

Critics received it as a fitting and powerful farewell, remarkable for its undiminished emotional ferocity. Stark, intimate and shadowed by mortality, Saraband is the closing statement of a director who spent half a century anatomising the human soul. That Bergman could end on a work this concentrated and unflinching is a testament to an artist who never stopped looking, however painful the view. That Bergman could close his career with a work this concentrated and unflinching is a testament to an artist who never stopped looking, however painful the view, and Ullmann anchors it with grave, hard-won compassion.