© 2020 by James Clark
Saraband (2003), carries much of the charges of a long filmic disputation; and it carries much of the charges of the very unique.
To enter this gigantic, swift and subtle construct, I’ve chosen the film’s moment which avoids direct presentation, while being at the core of its revelatory bloodletting, figurative and literal. That being the discipline of art.
The watchword of two of the major players here, reaching back thirty years, to the film, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), was, “We speak the same language,” that is to say, the language of advantage, which is to say, the language of pedantry. Marianne and Johan elect to follow two similar skills, she being a lawyer, while he being a medical researcher. They and their ilk live and die for information. They are typical in having a long family history of being committed to each of those disciplines. Their work requires heavy doses of pedantry, from which to earn large amounts of prestige and money. Soldiers of Fortune. The volatility of that action, that maximum of being masterly, had, in our players today, especially in the case of Johan, a pronounced leaning to promiscuity. Their divorce, in the face of that upheaval, brought about two changes: Marianne becoming far more cynical in subsequent couplings; and Johan, after several marriages, being involved with a woman (never given so much as a name in this story), having given birth to a son opting for music, instead of conclusions—someone not speaking his language! (“I never did like him. He looked so ridiculous. Overweight and meek. He surrounded me with a sickly kind of love. I admit I ignored that love. He was as devoted as a dog. I wanted to kick him. Figurately, of course.”) (more…)
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