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My husband and I continue our journey through my Top 25 Favorite Bergman Films, in Criterion’s curated order, with Saraband.

This one doesn’t quite pack the punch that Scenes from a Marriage does, but it still is an engaging film with great performances. I think of this film less as a sequel, but more of an alternative universe in which Marianne and Johan exist - one where they have children with different names, where they’re closer in age to Liv and Erland, but where at their core they’re the still the same people 30 years later.

I love that this film has a lot of similarities with former Bergman films, and seeing as it was his last film, why shouldn’t it? There’s a young ingenue who longs to play in an orchestra (To Joy), incest (Through a Glass Darkly), a chapter titled Hour of the Wolf, characters named Anna (Passion of Anna) and Karin (Virgin Spring), and Henrik (Smiles of a Summer Night), a structure of ten scenes where no more than two characters interact at a time as if they were on a stage (The Rite), and characters directly looking at the audience to address them breaking the fourth wall (The Magic Flute). Marianne even jokingly tells Johan he is acting like a forgotten character from some old movie at one point - the tongue in cheek meta moment where the film Scenes from a Marriage might exist within the world of Saraband.

Like most Bergman films, there is a lot to unpack in Saraband beyond the surface level. Even the title, itself, is a reference to an infamous scene in Autumn Sonata. Saraband is at times touching, quirky, and downright bizarre. It felt like Twin Peaks: The Return before it ever existed - granting us a sliver of familiarity with characters we have grown to know, but then taking everything you think you know and scraping it completely. Saraband may leave one with more questions than Scenes from a Marriage did, but I don’t think Bergman would have had it any other way.

Verdict: In my Top 25 Favorite Bergman Films