Saraband

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

The film is built from a series of intense two-character dialogues, and its title comes from the Bach cello suites that recur throughout. The old couple are the way in, but the heart of it is Johan's poisonous relationship with his son and his tender bond with his granddaughter, a young cellist. Bergman shoots in unsparing digital close-up and returns 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, hard-won compassion.

Critics received it as a fitting and powerful farewell, and were struck by how little of his emotional ferocity the years had taken from him. It is stark and intimate, shadowed by mortality throughout, and Saraband is the closing statement of a director who spent half a century anatomising the human soul. That Bergman could end his career on a work this concentrated and unflinching tells you what kind of artist he was: one who never stopped looking, however painful the view, and who was still looking hard at eighty-five.