Ingmar Bergman has always been one of the most fiercely original filmmakers of his generation, so it's a bit puzzling he's chosen as his last project a sequel that can't stop referencing his earlier work.
Saraband begins as a reunion of ex-husband and wife Johan (Josephson) and Marianne (Ullmann) from 1973's Scenes From a Marriage. Thirty-two years have passed, and Marianne suddenly gets the urge to visit.
This being Bergman, something's rotten in Sweden. Apart from a bit of palsy in Johan's hand and more cash in his pocket from an inheritance, little has changed. There's nothing to still tie the couple together, and they never see their daughters—one has moved to Australia (that far enough away for you?) and the other's gone insane.
The familial damage doesn't stop there. Johan's son from a second marriage, Henrik (Ahlstedt), lives in a small cabin near Johan's isolated house and hates his father (vice versa—Johan's nostrils flare when he lays eyes on Henrik). Henrik's daughter, Karin (Dufvenius), has been made a surrogate for his dead wife, Anna, and knows that if she leaves him, he'll kill himself. The fact they sleep in the same bed doesn't make things easier.
At 87, Bergman is still able to take overwrought scenarios and lines such as "they've taken away my ovaries and uterus" and give them real weight, and his use of color, music (mostly Bach in this case) and faces has lost none of its effectiveness. But Saraband spends too much of its time careening off into half-assed tributes to Bergman's 60 years as a filmmaker: The line, "That I'm already dead, though I don't know it" (a paraphrase from Wild Strawberries); someone narrating from literature as nature scenes are spliced together (Persona); a bright light suddenly filling a church (Winter Light); someone unable to sleep at "vargtimme"—the hour before dawn (Hour of the Wolf).
Bergman's fertile mind would seem to preclude this much self-plagiarizing, but it gets worse. He inserts an autobiographical element by dedicating the film "To Ingrid"—his wife, Ingrid von Rosen, who died of cancer in 1995. Her portrait is used for Anna (who also died of cancer), and not only is that picture shown throughout the film, but all four characters constantly talk of her as if she were a saint.
For all its sound and fury, Saraband leaves you with something far more unsettling than its lack of resolution—the possibility that Bergman has run out of things to say.