Saraband

Saraband (2003) is Ingmar Bergman's final chamber drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Three decades after Scenes from a Marriage, Marianne drives out to see her ex-husband Johan — and walks into a house full of slow-burning resentment.

Johan is old, wealthy and bitter, sharing the grounds with a son he can barely stand. The son, Henrik, has wrapped his whole life around Karin — his daughter, Johan's granddaughter, a gifted cellist. Since her mother died, Henrik teaches her, clings to her, and quietly suffocates her dream of leaving for a proper conservatory. Marianne, the outsider, turns out to be the only one who can hear all three of them at once. Bergman tells it in ten two-person scenes, almost nothing else on screen.

This is the last thing Bergman ever directed, made for Swedish television when he was eighty-five. Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson returned to roles they first played in 1973 and let their characters grow old without softening them. It asks for patience and pays it back: the talk is hushed, the wounds run deep. If you go for late, unsparing films about family, stream Saraband (2003) online on iFILM.