Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers are two minimalist features about burned-out individuals picking over the wreckage of relationships they can barely remember and about the special art of not really giving a shit. (A third is Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, scheduled to open here next week.) With its sprawling and far from symmetrical plot, Saraband, made in 2003 for Swedish television, is stark and economical, with a small cast of characters and sparse rural settings, and it seems like an apocalyptic endgame in terms of Bergman’s own career—the end of the world as he knows it. It was shot in digital video, and at Bergman’s insistence is being projected as such—and his peculiar use of that medium is what makes this work compelling.
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As a consequence I approached this sequel to the 1973 Scenes From a Marriage with trepidation. At the end of the earlier film Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), who were married for 16 years before they divorced and remarried others, meet secretly in the country, discuss their failed marriage, and make love again. In Saraband, set 32 years later, Marianne visits Johan at his summer home, where his son and granddaughter are living—and mourning the death of the son’s wife two years earlier. Not much happens, apart from a failed suicide, but a lot gets chewed over.
Murray’s minimalism helps make this Jarmusch’s most minimalist feature to date. One of the drawbacks of minimalism is that its few elements can take on hyperbolic importance, which may be why there’s something forced about the ways Jarmusch suggests that Murray’s affectless, passive-aggressive character—who’s in denial about being the instigator of all the action—was once a Don Juan, through everything from his name to the Douglas Fairbanks movie he’s watching on TV. Like Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, Broken Flowers can be read largely as a querulous lament for the 60s counterculture, for what it became. The only love and bliss apparent in the film is felt by the Ethiopians, who are viewed affectionately—and more than a little fancifully.
Directed and written by Ingmar Bergman
With Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephon, Borje Ahlstedt, Julia Dufvenius, and Gunnel Fred
Broken Flowers ★★★ (A must see)
Directed and written by Jim Jarmusch
With Bill Murray, Julie Delpy, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Alexis Dziena, Frances Conroy, Christopher McDonald, Chloe Svigny, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, and Mark Webber
