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.

The Serpent's Egg

Ingmar Bergman's father was a Lutheran minister who became chaplain to the King of Sweden. Despite his religious background, I would guess Bergman leaned toward atheism based on the secular thinking his characters exhibit. The main character in Wild Strawberries suggests that his wife's infidelity is not a betrayal because human beings lack free will and they are not morally responsible for their conduct. In Scenes from a Marriage, a married lawyer gets pregnant, and she and her husband decide to abort the pregnancy for the sake of convenience. The son of the main character in Wild Strawberries threatens to leave his wife unless she has an abortion because his sense of duty to his child would deprive him of the option of committing suicide when he felt like it.

If Bergman was an atheist, he bears some resemblance to Friedrich Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche's father was a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche argued that religious ideas disparage man's existence. They suggest that  life on Earth is corrupt and evil, and that true value resides in a transcendent beyond where we will become one with God after we die. This view is foolish because, although life on Earth may be full of suffering and violence, it is also full of beauty, and it is only the existence we will know. There is nothing beyond this world.

Bergman seemed to respect Christianity's ability to inspire us to create beauty. He said it was worthwhile to build cathedrals whether or not God existed. The sentiment that religion is false, but uplifting and not altogether bad, is expressed by the priest in the following dialogue from Bergman's 1977 film, The Serpent's Egg:

Manuela: And I try to tell him that we’ll help each other, but that’s only words for him. And everything I say is useless. The only real thing is fear. And I’m sick. I don’t know what’s wrong. Is there any forgiveness?

Priest: Would you like me to pray for you?

Manuela: Do you think that would help?

Priest: I don’t know.

Manuela: Now?

Priest: Yes, now.

Manuela: Is it a special prayer?

Priest: Yes, yes. Let me think.

We ...

We live so far away from God...

...that he probably doesn’t hear us when we pray for help.

So ...

we must help each other, give each other the forgiveness that a remote God denies us.

I...say to you...

...that you are forgiven for your husband’s death. You’re no longer to blame. And I beg your forgiveness...

...for my apathy...

...and my indifference.

Do you forgive me?

Manuela: Yes, I forgive you.

Priest: That’s all we can do. I must hurry. The parish priest becomes annoyed if I’m late.

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.