Review of Wild Strawberries (2012) by Art S — 14 Dec 2018

Having seen Wild Strawberries many times before, I decided to watch the new blu-ray version with film critic Peter Cowie's audio commentary turned on. I don't know that it offered many more insights or facts beyond what I already knew - and it may have impacted on my appreciation of the film this time (too distracting).

That said, Wild Strawberries is still undoubtedly a masterpiece from film titan Ingmar Bergman. His regular troupe of actors is here: Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Naima Wifstrand - but the lead role goes to Victor Sjöström, then 79-years-old and a fabled film director and star actor in his own right (known most famously for The Phantom Carriage, 1921, He Who Gets Slapped, 1924, and The Wind, 1928).

Sjöström plays Isak Borg (note the initials), a retired professor of medicine who will travel from Stockholm to Lund over the course of the film (a 14 hour car journey) in order to receive an honorary degree.

The journey becomes a psychic exploration of Borg's past and principally his relationships with women; it seems that his has been a lonely existence, possibly due to his own cold selfish nature, which may in turn be a result of his relations with his parents (an autobiographical note from Bergman himself).

This subtext is told primarily through dream sequences that offer some glimpses of reality as it may have been and some nightmarish eruptions of anxiety filled with symbolism (clocks with no hands) and a foreboding sense of imminent death.

We see fond reveries of his first crush, Sara (Bibi Andersson), in the wild strawberry patch - and then we later see her in a frightening scene where she holds a mirror up to Borg to show him his flaws (surely not something that really happened).

Sara is also mirrored by her modern day doppelganger, a modern young Sara who Borg and his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) pick up hitchhiking with two male travelling companions on their way to Italy.

While Marianne gives Borg a piece of her mind (informing him how his own son hates him for the way he has been treated), the new young Sara gives Borg a chance to amend his ways, soften his personality, and reflect on his own behaviour.

Marianne and her estranged husband (Borg's son; Gunnar Björnstrand) have fought over whether to have children (he thinks that it is cruel to bring anyone into this terrible world - an existential truism for Bergman, perhaps) but by the end of the film, they will reconcile and Borg's own anxieties will have calmed.

Yet overall, the film seems ambivalent toward life and relationships - Bergman sees them as affording both great torment and the opportunity for beautiful communion. Each generation passes along its successes and failures to the next one - yet there is still hope that one can escape this determinism, if perhaps only on our deathbeds! A rich and provocative film that would reward closer study.