Saraband

Wednesday June 1, 7:15pm Egyptian Theater
Saturday June 4, 4:15pm Neptune Theater

Thirty years after their divorce, Marianne decides to visit Johan at his summer home in the country. In this reprisal of their roles from Ingmar Bergman's 1973
Scenes from a Marriage, we find the couple oddly at ease with each other despite their years apart. From the start they are embroiled in a conflict surrounding
Johan, Henrik his son from another marriage, and Henrik's beautiful young daughter Karin. Following a structure of prologue, epilogue and ten chapters, the
film begins and ends with Marianne, the outsider in this story. Arriving to surprise Johan, she finds herself a mediator by default. She becomes the shoulder
Karin cries on, a soundboard for Johan and the victim of Henrik's reprehensible inquires and accusations. The girl, a brilliant cellist instructed by her father, longs
to grow beyond the suffocating captivity of her father. Her mother and Henrik's wife, Anna, has been dead and gone for two years. Unable to bear the loss of
the wife that loved him, Henrik clings to all that remains of her, their daughter. The hatred between father and son is consuming. Henrik's desire for his father to
die, leaving him an inheritance barely exceeds Johan's need to belittle and humiliate his son. Again and again we are reminded of Anna, and her loss. Loved by
all, she seems the polar opposite of Henrik. The girl, sad and vulnerable, refuses to leave for fear of her father's suicide. Near the end of her visit Marianne, in
conversation with Johan, is shocked by the depth of his hatred for his own son, proof that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Bergman, eighty-five when Saraband was filmed has demonstrated the mastery that brought us The Virgin Spring and Persona remains intact. Here is a story,
bleak and sorrowful, told with exquisite simplicity and focus. Social turmoil, mourning, incest and nostalgic longing for the past set amid the scenic countryside.