Sunday, October 25, 2009

Wild Strawberries

At the beginning of this 1957 film by Ingmar Bergman, an elderly professor of medicine, Isak Borg, explains that he has withdrawn from society because human relationships make it necessary to discuss other people's conduct, and he wants to avoid the mistakes and exaggerations that go along with judging others. Borg has tried to suppress his interest in and feeling for people. He laughs when his ravishing daughter-in-law, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin, shown in the screenshot above), reveals that his son, Evald, hates him. He has no interest in the marital problems that caused Marianne to leave Evald several weeks earlier.

Borg and Marianne drive to Lund, Sweden, where Borg will receive an honorary degree. Borg confronts his approaching death and revisits painful moments of his past in a series of flashbacks and dreams. When a coffin falls out of a horse-drawn wagon on a deserted street in a dream sequence, the body inside turns out to be his own. Marianne and Borg stop at the house in the country where Borg spent the summers of his youth. In a flashback there, his younger brother wins the affections of Sara, the cousin he loved. A dream he has while Marianne is driving reenacts the episode in which his wife, 40 years earlier, yielded to the advances of another man in a forest. In post-coital talk, she tells her seducer that Borg will express pity for her and insist that she has committed no wrong that he can forgive. Borg has transcended the idea of free will to the point he can't hold his wife's breach of her marital vows against her.

After waking up from this painful dream, Borg tells Marianne that his dreams have been forcing him to acknowledge truths that he avoids while awake. Reciprocating his confidence in her, Marianne volunteers that she left Evald because she recently got pregnant and Evald insisted that she abort the pregnancy.
After Marianne and Borg arrive in Lund and Borg receives the honorary degree, he retires to bed in Evald's home. Borg forgives the debt that Evald had been working long hours to repay, and Evald reveals that he could not live without Marianne and had therefore accepted her decision to keep the child. To rid himself of restlessness, as he is preparing for sleep in the final scene, Borg recalls an image of his childhood at the summerhouse. It is one of the three or four most powerful moments I have ever experienced in film.
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The greatness of films can't be separated from dialogue and personality, which are literary qualities that can't be reproduced in a still image. I think this is why film posters for great movies are almost always disappointing in comparison to the films they advertise.
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Bergman used surrealistic elements to develop his characters' personalities. In Wild Strawberries, Bibbi Anderson plays the cousin Borg loved and one of a trio of hitchhikers whom Borg and Marianne pick up. They're both named Sara, but the hitchhiker has short hair so the fact that it's the same actress isn't immediately obvious. Andersson's dual role subtly conveys that Borg is still obsessing over Sara's choice of his brother 60 years after the fact. "Get over it." It's easier said than done.

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