E-Mail This Article to a Friend Scenes from a festival Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband and much more in Montreal BY GERALD PEARY

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who was born in 1915, has announced more retirements than Celine Dion; but this time, with a final feature, Saraband, at the recent 28th Montreal World Film Festival, he really might be through. His December song, both absorbing and more than a bit tedious, is a two-hour, four-character sequel to his 1973 Strindbergian psychodrama Scenes from a Marriage.

"Several years ago, I got a phone call at my office," said Pia Ehrnvall, Saraband’s producer, who introduced the film at Montreal. She quoted Bergman on the line: " ‘Hey, Pia, I wrote a screenplay, I don’t know if it’s for TV, stage, or the movies. It’s a chamber drama, the set decoration is two chairs only, and four actors. Would you like to produce? There’s one condition: if you like it, I have to direct it myself.’

"In 2003, we started shooting on a sound stage in Stockholm," Ehrnvall went on, "and the set decoration was far more than four chairs. Bergman started with a few words: ‘You all know what to do. It looks simple, but we have our work cut out. This is the very last production that I make. I demand everything from you, and from myself.’ "

It’s 30 years later, and his feuding marrieds from the first film, Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), divorced for ages, meet again at Johan’s home in the country. Both have failed as parents (their children, now adults, have moved to foreign lands and no longer speak to them), and Johan especially is proclaiming his whole life a failure. He’s the numb, blighted post-Christian we’ve encountered in several dozen Bergman movies going back to the 1950s.

Although there’s nostalgia in seeing Bergman icons Ullmann and Josephson reunited on the screen, Saraband is a last-blast retread of what we’ve suffered again and again in Bergman. There’s no coda to take the film into new philosophic territory, no epiphanic lightning flash as Bergman approaches 90. Alas, here’s the same unrelenting world view: parents and children desperately alienated; God, the father, quiet in the cosmos.

Saraband was shown Out of Competition at Montreal, but would it have garnered any prizes? Would the Bergman name have drawn voters away from Eran Riklis’s The Syrian Bride? This French-German-Israeli co-production swept all the major awards: the World Competition Grand Prix, the FIPRESCI international critics’ prize, the Ecumenical Jury prize, and the Audience Award. Distributors take note, and also Jewish film festivals looking for a popular opening night: The Syrian Bride was loved by all.

Almost all. I thought it a bit TVish and didactic in hawking its politically correct attack on the sanctity of man-made borders. The story is interestingly placed, however, in a Druze village in the Golan Heights. Mona, a Druze living within Israel, is engaged to a Syrian TV star, and the movie is a black comedy about the bureaucratic entanglements, in both Israel and Syria, that impede the couple’s getting together. Even the UN is brought in to join the madcap frustrations.

The best film at Montreal? Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand/Head-On, which earlier this year won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and is certainly the only masterpiece I’ve seen in 2004. The Turkish-German Akin tells a love story of two wild Turks over several continents, beginning in Germany with zany screwball comedy and ending in Istanbul with heartfelt, affecting melodrama-turned-tragedy.

Other works of merit at Montreal? Red-Colored Grey Truck, directed by Serbia’s best young screenwriter, Srdjan Koljevic, is a clever tall-tale road movie set in the first days of the 1991 war. A snarling punk chick from Belgrade and a rube from Bosnia head down the highway in a truck, driving inadvertently into the battle zone. The road warriors are out of their heads, dense Beverly hillbillies with explosives, in a stupid, stupid war. Red-Colored Grey Truck is the first Slovenian-Serbian co-production, and Koljevic is doing something right. He was attacked after the Montreal showing by a Serbian consul from Toronto who accused him of pro-Slovenian propaganda.

And Elephant Shoes, Christos Sourligas’s made-in-Montreal two-hander, is a deftly written, delicately acted love story, 12 compact, erotic hours in which an early-30ish couple meet, make love, make the most clever talk, and then must decide whether they are forever soulmates or, sadly, must part. A little miracle on a $10,000 budget, and the talented newcomer actors, Stacie Morgain Lewis and Greg Shamie, steal the audience’s heart.