Review of Wild Strawberries (2012) by Saddam H — 15 Jan 2009

Ingmar Bergman's film Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) is about an old man's life. The man in the film is a doctor and a professor. He spends the film making his way to the town of Lund where he is to receive an honorary degree. Over the course of the film he has nightmares and daydreams which cause him to reevaluate his life as he thinks about his old age and impending death. The plot was interesting, but I found Bergman's The Seventh Seal to be a more engaging film.

The old man is played by Swedish actor Victor Sjöström. I thought his performance was fairly good. As I do not speak Swedish, it is somewhat difficult to critique his delivery of his lines, but I found his facial expressions and mannerisms to be quite good. For his portrayal as Professor Borg, he was awarded the National Board of Review Award for Best Actor which is an impressive feat as he is the only actor to win the award for a foreign-language film. The award was first handed out in 1945.

Overall, this film felt a lot like Bergman's film Autumn Sonata. While this film did not feature any actors famous to American audiences (like Ingrid Bergman in Autumn Sonata), I thought this was a better film. While Autumn Sonata attempted to do much of what this film did, the characters didn't come off as interesting. If I would have seen this film first, I would have been even less impressed with Autumn Sonata as it offers very little that this film did not already offer. I would still rank this film as slightly inferior to The Seventh Seal as I'm not really sure what deeper meaning this film has. It talks about a man's life but this man isn't really that important in the grand scheme of things. While people can relate to the idea of reassessing their lives, this doesn't seem terribly significant. Still, it's a good movie and will actually receive a higher score than The Seventh Seal which in retrospect was graded too harshly.

76/100.

C.

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