Marianne and Johan meet again after thirty years without contact, when Marianne suddenly feels a need to see her ex-husband again. She decides to visit Johan at his old summer house in the western province of Dalarna. And so, one beautiful autumn day, there she is, beside his reclining chair, waking him with a light kiss. Also living at the summer house are Johan's son Henrik and Henrik's daughter Karin. Henrik is giving his daughter cello lessons and already sees her future as staked out. Relations between father and son are very strained, but both are protective of Karin. They are all still mourning Anna, Henrik's much-loved wife, who died two years ago, yet who, in many ways, remains present among them. Marianne soon realizes that things are not all as they should be, and she finds herself unwillingly drawn into a complicated and upsetting power struggle.

"A minimalist monument to the rusted complacency, howling resentment, and stubborn devotion bred by a long entanglement, Scenes from a Marriage (1973) is a virtual two-hander for the Bergman stalwarts Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who reunited three decades later for what the 87-year-old director has declared his final film. Shot like its predecessor largely in merciless close-ups, the digital-video Saraband is less a sequel than an expansive coda, beginning when Marianne (Ullmann) impulsively decides to visit her ex-husband, Johan (Josephson), after an estrangement of more than 30 years. Marianne at first appears to be our guide down a knotty memory lane, but not long after she arrives at Johan's remote cottage, she becomes a sympathetic bystander to a newer, festering family psychodrama. Johan seethes with loathing for his doughy, hapless son, Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt), but he remains benevolent toward Henrik's lissome kid, Karin (Julia Dufvenius). Father and daughter are penniless cellists boarding in Johan's guest house, and the incestuous overtones of their bond, coupled with the camera's lingering glances upon a photo of Karin's dearly departed mother, only thicken the air of ingrown decay. Like Scenes from a Marriage, the new film is a study of diseased symbiosis that unfolds as a series of dialogues, the sparring rife with the brutal existential candour that is the lingua franca of Bergman's cinema. Saraband brings to mind another valedictory chamber piece—it's as hermetically Bergmanesque as Gertrud was hermetically Dreyeresque, a parlour-room theatre of emotional cruelty, with all exits barred by the past."

Stig Björkman: "Pure kamikaze"

Andrew Sarris: "Ingmar Bergman gives us scenes from a long lifetime"