The other night I saw Ingmar Bergman’s sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, and I must say, at least initially, I’m somewhat dissatisfied; for all my high expectations, Saraband turns out to be - not that that’s such a terrible thing - just another Bergman film.

(Spoilers follow.)

The film is not really about Johan and Marianne, for starters, and seems to squander the economy of the original: a series of verbal dances and jousts in airless rooms. In Saraband Johan has moved to a life of relative isolation in the wilderness, and Marianne has come to visit. But the film is really more about Johan and his relationship to his middle-aged son Henrik, and for those like me who wanted more of the same, opening up the film this way - there’s Henrik’s daughter, the absent fifth character (Henrik’s deceased wife Anna), and the audience, who Marianne addresses directly at the beginning and end of the film - seemed to include people who shouldn’t have been invited to the dance.

There are also plot revelations that seem terribly… lazy, I guess, is the right word - the kind that you’re probably told to avoid in screenwriting classes. Saraband also seems - and this may ultimately be a half-empty / half-full glass situation—frighteningly pessimistic.

Part of the many pleasures of Scenes from a Marriage was the spectacle of language unfettered, how it gushed out in torrents, even as it concealed and deceived, even as words were the manifestation of a perhaps unnecessary honesty, where language was used both as weapon and, crucially, as salve. The former film - especially as seen in the last act - focuses more on the giddy bond of intimacy; even if they couldn’t stay together, they were at least open to each other. Even within their confined spaces, and in the joyless context of separation and divorce, their words had a liberating, even transcendent, effect. Even if they were alone “in the middle of the night in a dark house somewhere in the world,” they at least had each other, and at least they were talking.

In Saraband, it’s the corrosive power of distance, of isolation, of non-communication that concerns Bergman. (We see glimpses of the woods and the lake outside, but the film is even more stifling than its predecessor.) One of the little shocks (at least for me) in the film is when the audience discovers that the couple has not spoken in thirty years. Perhaps the vision of Johan and Marianne cheerfully cheating on their new respective spouses for the next three decades was too much of a fantasy for the audience after all, and maybe Bergman meant it this way. The irony is that Scenes from a Marriage, while about divorce, is the film that’s more about openness; one expected Saraband to explore the further deepening of Johan and Marianne’s relationship, but is in fact about its exact opposite.

One of the other shocks, at least for me, was the sight of Erland Josephson’s right hand shaking involuntarily; indeed, I almost lost it when he struggles to get up from his chair to give Liv Ullmann a hug. Actually, there’s only really one deliberately tearjerking moment which comes fairly early in the film; seen in the context of all five hours of Scenes from a Marriage, the pathos is well-earned. (But it was no surprise to see Liv Ullmann still look like, well, Liv Ullmann.)

But Saraband is also about how hate festers and is distilled. Johan’s charm and wit (even as he was being the “pitiable” philanderer) in the first film has been boiled away, as it were, since he has been transformed into the stereotypically crotchety (and here, venomous) sad old man. Ultimately, the film is about love in its destructive forms, with the characters held up to a (perversely?) impossible, saint-like ideal as embodied by the absent Anna.

Towards the end, Johan is afflicted, in the middle of the night, by “mental diarrhea” trying to escape out of his body through every pore, terrified by (an unspoken) fear of death. The scene is capped by a lazy (for Bergman) visual metaphor: Johan takes off his clothes and stands naked in the doorway. But together his and Marianne’s nakedness is merely superficial: they are naked, if not before each other, then at least to the world or an ostensibly pitying God, but the possibility for human communication is still stymied. Or maybe not: perhaps it is what unspoken between them that is, at this juncture, most eloquent.

Repeatedly Marianne is asked by each character why she has come to visit, and she responds, almost every single time, that she does not know. I think it is crucial that we take her answer at face value: the soul searches, but for what and which reason is never really clear. The film seems to be ultimately about, if one can reduce it so primitively, connection (or, that old Scenes from a Marriage word again, intimacy), our many failed attempts at it, and the impossibility of achieving it altogether—but that maybe, even in our clumsy, inarticulate ways, we sometimes get it right.