The Swede’s subtle humor unappreciated, anticipations of doom-and-gloom keep critically and art-house acclaimed Lutheran pastor’s son Ingmar Bergman off high box-office radar. It was a given that this Baltic recluse would not show up from Faro Island, but the pleasure of listening to Liv Ullmann following the New York Film Festival media screening, more than made up for his absence.

Now mid-sixtyish, over twenty years younger than the director with whom she shared five years of life and whose friend and sometimes collaborator she remains to this day, the Tokyo-born Norwegian actress, screenwriter, director and humanitarian-cause activist finds fulfillment enough in behind-the-camera activities. But when he called about a film part being written with her in mind, “I’d have to be an idiot to say no.”

Bergman’s passion these past twenty and more years has been writing for and directing Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, along with TV work, a film memoir, an autobiography and a novel. He had been assumed past his best work when, in 1983, the mellower than usual but still personal Fanny and Alexander scored with critics and public, and he then announced his retirement from cinema. Within twelve months, however, his edited-from-television After the Rehearsal was theatrically released. There have been other, subsequent disclaimers about never returning to movies, and this one, too, is his “last,” on which he pleaded headache to avoid the cast and crew’s goodbye party. But, who knows, Ullmann sees their similarity, confesses herself “like Ingmar. I say one thing and in my heart I may mean another.”

The modern digital revolution furnished a new experience for director and actress. In previous projects, with Bergman alongside the camera, you were acting to, and for, him, whereas this time around he might be in a room looking at a video screen while the actors were elsewhere. But, “for example, when I’m playing alone and thought for this last scene I wish he were close . . . it was like ‘secret smoke signals’ [communication], no one knew we had been Indians.”

Some prefer vinyl to CDs, some -- myself included, in both cases -- the older film feel to these HD technological advances, in that what the current Saraband (from Sony Pictures Classics) gains in crispness and color, it loses in that bold, brooding visual quality so essential in this director’s early work. Not necessarily better or worse, just different, as the month-long Autumn 2002 shoot had begun with three cameras, pared to two after just four days, and soon thereafter to a single one, a great departure from the several used for, say, the lively 1974 realization of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

But the experience of creating again in the “world with actors and people like Ingmar [is] wonderful,” for Ullmann enjoys working with those to whom she feels close, since “we can touch things.” For her, one of Saraband’s two most important scenes -- the other being her character’s in-bed explanation for making the two-hundred-mile trip: “You called for me” -- lasts but seconds and easily passes unnoticed: going to see retarded Martha (Gunnel Fred), and “for the first time in my life, I touched my daughter.” “Maybe,” she reflects, “it’s Ingmar’s way to say what he can’t say, that you can touch someone many times, but only one time is the real one.”

Artists, she elaborates, like Beethoven “touch the personal until the very end,” for their greatness lies in exploring and pushing boundaries. Though Ullmann does “not recognize the personal me in this film,” one wonders how much of personal Bergman is here. His quintessential ethical themes of good and evil, life and death, and the introspective world of women, are frequently referred to as autobiographical, his style classified intensely personal. The autobiography The Magic Lantern notwithstanding, however, and the novel-screenplay The Best Intentions about his parents’ courtship and marriage, plus a film memoir Images: My Life in Film, still leave the suspicion that the director is untouched and unknown, the life -- if revealed -- hinted at in metaphors but never to be pinned down: tell the truth but tell it slant.

In the face of today’s insistence on constant novelty, Ullmann praised what she called the “artistic bravery” to go to the old, “revisit it and go deeper.” “I believe maybe the music is there before he begins writing,” and though Bergman does not return to the capital he always listens to opera. To its very title, Saraband certainly begins in music, is a story of music and makers, but the idea, the prompt, she thinks, was a novel he had begun about the dead who remain emotionally among the living, that and Bergman’s desire to see again characters “he knew very well. Marianne and Johan.”

There are echoes of others of his more than forty film titles -- The Virgin Spring specifically alluded to in Q&A -- but this is Scenes from a Marriage (originally six TV episodes) thirty years later. The frame beginning and end is Marianne (Ullmann), a sixty-three-year-old lawyer seated before scattered photos on a long table -- Bergman’s deliberate reminder of an actress and movie-ness, as distinct from his personal story -- and speaking to the lens-as-viewer. Familial relationships disposed of -- a childless married daughter in Australia, another institutionalized -- after thirty-some years she will visit her faithless ex-husband, though she is not, she asserts, at all impulsive.

Financially freed by an inheritance from an aunt, Johan (Erland Josephson) resigned from the university, purchased his grandparents’ summer house outside Orsa, Dalarna, and there “in voluntary exile . . . in the wilderness lair” lives with books and music, the never-seen but testy, possessive Agda Nilsson coming from town to clean up and cook. Not paying rent, it will be learned, for his lake cottage on the grounds, is Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt), two years Marianne’s junior, an orchestra director and teacher, and Johan’s son by another woman. Saraband is dedicated to Bergman’s wife Ingrid, dead a decade, and Henrik mourns his beloved wife of twenty years, Anna, who died of cancer two years ago.

With this son is granddaughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius), “Carrie,” a promising but restless nineteen-year-old cellist for whom the father plans a conservatory scholarship and brilliant soloist career. Bullying and abject, insulting and whining by turns, Henrik is in need of money and of the girl’s unquestioning compliance with his love and his dream for her.

Paralleling Marianne and Johan’s lack of any contact over decades, is the latter and Henrik’s less than minimal relationship. For reasons growing from weakness and strength, they not simply dislike but absolutely despise each other, and tied into this is Anna, dead but a palpable presence. Sexual relationships are not specified in this ten-movement film, and its two in-bed scenes leave one wondering, but Bergman -- and narrator Marianne -- cannily says nothing. With no friends around, alternately driven and caressed by her father, haunted by the dead mother who was more far-sighted than she knows, Karin finds her confidante in Marianne (while we listen in).

The older woman and the viewer are ensnared. In her office, Marianne’s closing-frame speech seems lamely naïve about the situation, and the end of her involvement with Johan manipulated. But Bergman has set out to do again what he has so beautifully achieved before, that is, to analyze what lies below surfaces, the loves, hatreds and obsessions that, unrealized or denied, inform relationships. That such are like quicksand, shifting and unconscious, renders elusive any attempt at definitive statement. Hence, in the midst of talkiness, the unspoken word, unrealized thought, unperformed deed, while the director invites his audience to piece it out, if they can.

(Saraband photo from the 2004 New York Film Festival Program.)