Review of Wild Strawberries (2012) by Nick O — 08 May 2011

Passivity existed in movies long past a year more than the oldest man in the world could remember, though "Wild Strawberries" was one of the first to utilize and even make the concept seem a layer light-years in the future. What a flipped charmer. What a knock out of the park. What a way to serialize mortality with enlightenment, and carefully translate the familiarity of everyday life with the specific resemblance of teatime dreams. With that "Wild Strawberries" romanticizes so surreally a single man's intellectual cripple that he enters the modern age kicking and screaming and breaks Ingmar Bergman's fourth wall. It's clear he doesn't just have connections with each of his characters, but shaped relationships, personal because they're each united states.

Everyone's different degrees of lost in "Wild Strawberries", starting first and foremost with patriarch Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom), a physician under a gravely influence and the remarkable ability to recall his past lives in slumber. His dreams are all that keep him running, and the only falsities he should choose to trust. Daughter-in-law Marianna (Ingrid Thulin) is unsettled to discover she can relate with Isak's doubts, being pregnant and thinking of splitting with Isak's son Evlund and all. Watch the two in the front seat of Isak's car, as Isak discloses to her his having to imagine being dead in order to convince others there's still something beating inside of him. Then a trio of hitchhikers Marianne and Isak have picked up en route to Lund, Sweden, where the latter is to accept a landmark medical award, approach Isak's window and hand him a picked bouquet of flowers. He knows the world by heart, they tell him. If only he could just appreciate the gesture; he's too broken from the aged decease of his wife to comprehend the arms open around him.

Isak isn't a martyr, nor is Bergman. They both of them believe that only through blood can the light of truth be crystal. Isak might have seen his wife as his own, and the kid in Marianne's belly his last untouched heir, but he's moreover jealous of either. He knows the world's heart well enough to understand there isn't much of one to listen for.