(2003; Swedish, subtitles) Writer/director Ingmar Bergman's film in ten acts, with prologue and epilogue (in which Marianne directly addresses the camera/audience), peers inside a family's misery and mystery involving intense love and hate.

After more than thirty years, Marianne (Liv Ullmann), a 63-year-old lawyer, decides to visit her former husband, Johan (Erland Josephson), who resides 200 miles away in the wilderness of Orsa. Johan, 86, has inherited a fortune; but that is not the motive for her visit. As she later explains to Johan's 19-year-old granddaughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius), she and Johan were married for sixteen years, divorced, & remarried other partners before once again becoming lovers, though Johan was "compulsively unfaithful." She admits to having been both naïve and knowledgeable. Together they had two daughters, both distant: Sara (married and living in Australia) and Martha (unable to recognize the outside world due to a mental illness).

Though Johan had declined Marianne's telephoned request for an invitation, he nevertheless asks her to stay once she has arrived. Discussing their past, Johan sums up his life as thoroughly idiotic and meaningless. A true marriage, he says, requires friendship and eroticism.

Karin and her father, Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt), a 61-year-old retired music professor who instructs her at playing the cello in preparation for her audition to enter the conservatory, have been residing rent-free from Johan in a nearby cottage. Karin pours out her heart to Marianne about her lunatic father and crazy grandfather. After a terrible argument with her papa, Karin returns home; in bed with her father, she listens to him tell of his fear of her leaving him two years after his wife and her mother's death. Anna had been "a belonging that was a miracle," Johan confides to his daughter, who carries her grief like an organ inside her body.

Henrik approaches his father for an advance on his inheritance in order to purchase a high-quality cello for Karin. Johan - who can barely acknowledge his overweight, mushy son's existence - treats Henrik with contempt, humiliating him. In a church where he has been practicing Bach on the organ, Henrik meets Marianne and reveals his handicap, his disability from the loss of his Anna. He tells her that he will know his own death when he sees Anna again. Crassly questioning Marianne's motive for the visitation after so many years - money or sex? - he says to her of Johan, "I hate him in every dimension of the word," asking if there's a way he can sue his father for the inheritance.

Karin receives generous offers as alternatives to her father's wish for her to be in the conservatory, and though she tells him that she wants to live an ordinary life, not as a soloist or surrogate for Anna, she fears what her father might do if she abandons him. Her discovery, which she shares with Marianne, of a letter hidden in a book written by her mother to Henrik a week before her death, in which Anna, prescient of Henrik's dependence on her and his soon-to-be "homeless love," pleads with her husband not to take advantage of Karin, steels her resolve at making her own decision. In the last scene of Karin and Henrik together, he asks his daughter, after she has revealed her knowledge of the letter and her decision not to audition for the conservatory, to play the fifth saraband from the Hindemith composition they've been practicing together.

After Karin leaves for two years of music education in Hamburg, her father unsuccessfully attempts suicide, about which Johan says to Marianne that Henrik fails at everything. In the weeks after Marianne returns to her home and legal practice, her contact with Johan eventually ceases from his end. During a visit with her daughter Martha, the woman who comprehends nothing, for a brief interval a window opens between mother and daughter before again closing, symbolic of the entire movie.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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