RETURN OF THE MASTER

REVIEWED - SARABAN: An only moderately harrowing scene in Ingmar Bergman's characteristically austere compendium of dramatic duologues begins with Johan (Erland Josephson), an elderly intellectual, appearing at the bedroom door of his estranged wife, Marianne (Liv Ullmann). Dripping with sweat, Johan declares that he is assailed by a "hellish anxiety bigger than me". He is desperate to shed this "gigantic, total mental diarrhoea".

These sorts of outbursts have offered much material for Bergman parodists down through the years and, truth be told, even in his greatest films - there was quite a bit of this in 1973's Scenes from a Marriage, to which Saraband is a sequel - they tended to saddle the drama with a weight no film could comfortably support.

But explicit expressions of the ghastliness of everything, though striking when they appear, form a comparatively small part of Bergman's dramatic repertoire. Most of Saraband, which was made for Swedish television, is made up of exquisitely tense exchanges between damaged souls, interspersed with shockingly bald outbursts of mental cruelty. Brilliantly performed by actors with faces carved from raw sadness, these inter-connected vignettes suggest that the director's talents remain impressively robust.

Beginning with a comparatively jaunty prologue, delivered straight to camera by Marianne, the picture focuses on the discontents of Johan and his family. His widowed son Hendrik (Börje Ahlstedt) borrows money from Dad to help him get by while he researches a book on Bach's St John's Passion. Hendrik's daughter (Julia Dufvenius), loved in inappropriate ways by both her father and Johan, has ambitions to be a concert cellist. All live in a beautiful mountain retreat, which, though vast and airy, still seems to impose a very Bergmanesque claustrophobia on its inhabitants.

There is much to digest in the edgy interactions, but one comes away, not for the first time, with the view that Bergman does not have a high regard for his own gender, and still less for those members of it (hermits, intellectuals) who behave as the director himself apparently does. Johan is selfish and cruel. Hendrick is pathetic and peevish.

By contrast, Marianne, a lawyer, is endlessly patient and open to compromise. Hendrick's late wife, whose photograph is woven through the piece, was, it appears, so saintly the grim earth couldn't bear her presence.

It is a pleasure to welcome back this singular talent, but let us hope that the 87-year-old director, here allegedly offering us his final film, doesn't spend too many of his latter days berating himself for being as men are.

Donald Clarke