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He's old now, largely forgotten, his work rarely seen outside a few classrooms. For a very long time, however, from the mid-1950s to the early '80s, no moviemaker anywhere commanded more attention, at least among film snoots, intellectuals, and, oddly, churchgoers, or at least the headier among them. For one, he was the master, the Man, the Swedish filmmaker whose work was prolific, stylistically bold, and always compelling, even haunting, albeit sometimes cryptic. Just about single-handedly, Ingmar Bergman exalted cinema into a searing, accessible, psycho-philosophical crucible, imbuing the medium with dead-serious intellectual and religious freight. More than that, though, especially for religious folk, what distinguished him in film after film was his painstaking (and painful) display of the death-throes of God in Western culture and, no less so, in his own dire soul. It is perhaps not too much to say that Bergman, born heavy-duty Lutheran, thrashed out for all to see both the before and the after of non-belief. After all, this is the fellow who wrote and directed films of deep-down faith angst, all riveting still, like The Seventh Seal (1957), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), The Passion of Anna (1969), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978), and a dozen others of equal worth but less fame. And then, since 1982 and his most celebrated film, the strangely sentimental Fanny and Alexander, a long silence. Only very occasionally has a screenplay borne the name Ingmar Bergman, and those he has given only to trusted others. (In the meanwhile, Bergman returned to the theater to direct more than twenty plays.)
Then, at 87, surprise, along comes another Bergman film, Saraband, the whole thing, both writing and directing, done by the magician himself. Released two years ago in his native Sweden, the film returns to characters whose messy divorce and afterlife Bergman scrutinized thirty years before in the five-hour Swedish television series Scenes from a Marriage (1973; later cut in half for movie houses). Long before reality TV or sagas on the home-life of gangsters and undertakers, Bergman inspected a single marriage for fissures that break into chasms of hostility. As for the sequel, well, the praise has been lavish: "vital … magnificent" (Phillip Lopate, Film Comment); "powerful and poignant" (Richard Corliss, Time); "marvelous" (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times); and "profoundly affecting … sublime" (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal). Not bad for an old guy.
Which means, happily, that this is the very same Bergman, in the days after the Fall and after Christendom, painting portraits of bereft, comfortless humanity as it lurches about trying to recoup its inestimable losses. To be sure, the one part of Lutheranism Bergman never discarded was its stringent realism about human nature (nor did witnessing his parents' marriage, his father a noted preacher, do much to cheer him up; Bergman himself was married five times). But ah, what bracing stuff this is, Bergman as moralist, turning once again with unflinching, dead-honest candor to regard a species hell-bent on self-deception, narcissism, avidity, and plain old meanness.
No one gets off easy—no one. If Bergman is tough on the shortfalls of his pious elders, he is harder still on the feckless self-absorption of the new élites, the belief-less modernists of Bergman's own sort, artists especially, who do no better than their parents, and usually a lot worse. Indeed, the predominant note in Bergman's long career is one of pained amazement at what people do to each other in pursuit of they know not what. And amid their willy-nilly scramble to wring from life some measure of blessing, a secular grace, be it love, sex, smartness, art, or cool, these narcissistic latecomers appear to be as insensible of their own malice as they are of life's limits. At least the bygone Christian vision reined in the worst when folks presumed they had something to be guilty about.
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