Fanny and Alexander

Ingmar Bergman planned to present Fanny and Alexander as a four-episode television movie with a run time of 312 minutes. He cut the theatrical version down to 188 minutes. Given my attention deficit, I thought Alicia and I would end up watching the film in two settings, but when we got to the two hour mark late on a Friday night we were both engrossed and wanted to see how the story would end.

The movie version is made up of three hour-long episodes, which describe Fanny and Alexander's idyllic lives as the children of two well-off actors, and the joyless existence they lead after their father (Oscar) dies and their mother (Emilie) remarries a strict Lutheran bishop. The film opens with rollicking Christmas eve celebrations in Uppsala, Sweden at the turn of the 20th century. The local theater company, which is directed by Oscar, puts on a play about the birth of Christ with heart-stopper Emilie playing the Virgin Mary. The performers attend a banquet given at an upscale restaurant owned by Alexander's uncle, Gustav Adolph, who admonishes his staff not to cast supercilious glances even though the actors are downmarket from the restaurant's usual clientele. Following the banquet, Alexander's extended family gathers at his grandmother's mansion to bring in Christmas day with joyous singing, drinking, and dancing. Gustav Adolph (the restaurateur) beds a 15-year old maid, to which his fat and broad-minded wife turns a blind eye. 

At the beginning of the second episode, Oscar's theater company rehearses the scene in Hamlet in which the ghost of Hamlet's father reveals that he was murdered by Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, who then married Hamlet's mother and gained the throne of Denmark. Oscar, playing the ghost, suffers a stroke and is taken back to the family mansion. Before dying, Oscar tells Emilie that in death he will be closer to her, Alexander, and Fanny than he was in life. Next to the deathbed is a pail splashed with green fluid that Oscar vomited during his death throes.

Emilie aids Oscar, dressed as the ghost of Hamlet's father, after he collapses. 

As the funeral procession bears Oscar's coffin to the  grave, Alexander mutters obscenities to himself in a rhythmic chain--shit, pussy, fuck, cunt, shit, pussy, fuck, cunt. The handsome and strict Lutheran bishop who presided over the funeral begins to court Emilie. The performance of the actor playing the bishop is tremendous; seldom have I felt so much loathing for a film character. Before the bishop announces to Alexander that he and Emilie will marry, he browbeats Alexander through threats and mild physical abuse into confessing a lie he told at school. Alexander, angry at Emilie for accepting the bishop's courtship, told his classmates that she had sold him to a circus which he would join come summer. Once Alexander confesses the lie, the bishop says that, "Imagination is a splendid thing, a mighty force, a gift from God. It is held in trust for us by the great artists, musicians, and writers." In other words, little boys commit a sin when they use their imaginations.

The bishop forces Alexander to confess his lie.

Emilie accepts the bishop's marriage proposal and agrees to his further request that she and her children sever all ties with their former lives. They do not bring any of their belongings to the austere castle where the bishop resides with his spinster sister, cruel mother, and mute aunt. The aunt is a repellent specimen, obese, immobile, dependent on others for feeding, and bluish in complexion. Through punishments which range from being locked in a bedroom to sustained beatings, the bishop tries to break Alexander's spirit and force the boy to love him. Emilie realizes she has made a terrible mistake, but she has no way out, as a lawyer confirmed that if she left the bishop the courts would award him custody not only of the child she was carrying for him, but of Alexander and Fanny as well.

In another invocation of Hamlet, the ghost of Alexander's father appears to Alexander's grandmother and urges her to take action to protect the children from the bishop. The grandmother enlists her secret lover, Isak, a Jewish banker, to rescue the children. In the final episode, Isak uses Jewish mysticism in an attempt to get the children out of the bishop's castle, and Isak's nephew uses his own mystical gifts to examine Oscar's hatred of the bishop.

The film begins with the joys of childhood and ends with a horrifying killing. Let The Right One In is similar in that it presents a haunting depiction of childhood innocence and the macabre, but Fanny and Alexander is more satisfying because of the intelligence of the dialogue, the depth of Bergman's characters, and the ghost of Old Hamlet haunting the story.