Sunday Morning! “Wild Strawberries”

Is there any artist whose been worse served by their reputation than Ingmar Bergman? His films are usually warm and humane, rather than bleak and dreary. They’re tightly-constructed, not slow and plodding. They’re emotionally direct and bracing, rather than esoteric or high-flown. Most of them are simple stories of average people facing life’s hardest challenges; about as unpretentious as storytelling can get. And the film that most people see first, The Seventh Seal, is something of an oddity in his filmography.

I realize I’ve already written about Persona, which is a definite oddity in Bergman’s filmography. However, if you haven’t seen a Bergman picture, I’d start with Wild Strawberries. It’s a surprisingly gentle film for Bergman, quiet and warmly humane, while still touching on the sort of existential and familial crises that drive many of his films. It’s one of his most accessible masterworks, and its reputation has grown since its release 1957, although it was an early favorite of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky.

The inspiration for the film was a feeling most of us have experienced at one time or another: that the past is so close to us that we could maybe turn down a side street and head there for a visit. Bergman had experienced a bout of illness after a period of career success and recalled a trip the year before in which he stopped at his Grandmother’s house in Uppsala and imagined opening a door and walking back into his childhood. This is the core image in the film: the older man observing his childhood from a close distance.

The film sets up its story from the first scene: an older professor (played by Swedish film great Victor Sjöström) is returning to his hometown in order to receive an honorary degree. He is traveling with his pregnant daughter-in-law, Marianne (played by Bergman regular Ingrid Thulin), who doesn’t seem to care for him very much, and meeting his loyal housekeeper at the destination. The morning of the trip, he recalls a disturbing dream from the night before in which he is standing on a street at dusk when a passing horse-drawn funeral car crashes and disgorges its cargo: a coffin carrying the professor himself. (This scene is an effective nightmare and a nice homage to Sjöström’s masterpiece The Phantom Carriage.) It’s clear that the upcoming award ceremony is an occasion for the professor to reflect upon his life and he’s troubled by what he sees.

If the premise sounds familiar, it’s because more than a few filmmakers have paid homage to Wild Strawberries. Woody Allen, for instance, borrowed this premise for at least three films. The problem with Allen’s films (one problem, anyway) is he writes about himself constantly, but never achieves any insight. Bergman is much more penetrating. His central character is broken in ways not immediately evideny. As the trip begins, we soon come to understand that the hero is a sort of an absent-hearted professor: his aloofness has caused pain to those around him, including the son whose head he holds a debt over unnecessarily.

In fact, Marianne reveals she is on the verge of leaving his son, Evald, who insists she abort their child. In an unsparing flashback, we see her accuse Evald of cowardice, an accusation which he accepts:

Yes. This life sickens me. I will not be forced to take on a responsibility that will make me live for one day longer than I want to. And you know that I mean what I say.

The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. When they stop to visit the professor’s elderly mother, she too is severe and aloof. Marianne has made up her mind to leave this family.

I thought: That’s his mother. An old woman, cold as ice, more forbidding than death. And this is her son, and there are light years between them. He himself says he’s a living corpse. And Evald is growing just as lonely, cold and dead. And I thought of the baby inside me. All along the line, there’s nothing but cold and death and loneliness. It must end somewhere.

Nobody writes dialogue like this anymore. The emotional sterility of the bourgeois class is a huge theme in Bergman’s work, and much of the art and literature of the last two centuries. It’s unclear if the theme has been played out, or if artists have simply become less willing to bite the hand of their “target audience.” Bergman tended to treat art as a place to work through his own obsessions and fears; it’s unsurprising he had been through a failed attempt to reconcile with his own parents not long before making this film.

Bergman could write a funny line when he wanted to.

The bourgeois world in Bergman is a sort of world apart, under glass; in the age of Twitter, we’d talk about how “privileged” these people are. When the Professor literally steps back into his past, while visiting the family’s old summer home, it is positively idyllic, a sort of gorgeous confectionary that he quite can’t bring himself to eat. We see him as a cheerful young boy, in love with a girl who chooses his brother over him, and breaks his heart. She already sees the aloofness in him, but something seems to freeze over inside the boy, which has yet to thaw by the end of his life.

Everything that happens on the trip, including the hitchhikers they pick up, seems to conspire to condemn him for this emotional sterility.

And yet, by the end of the film, Marian, and the audience, can’t help but feel for the man, to hope that maybe he can fix a few things before his life ends. He tries to make amends. It doesn’t quite work. By the time he receives the award for his life’s accomplishments, that life in fact seems pretty empty. At this point, a lesser filmmaker would have gone with the “Christmas Carol” happy ending; while the stereotypical “Bergman film” would have ended with bleakness and despair.

But, there is hope in Bergman. Or, at least, he realizes the most we can hope for in this life is a little self-understanding, and the slight redemption that comes with that. In this case, it makes all the difference.

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, playing, pondering, watching, or revisiting this weekend?