Film: Wild Strawberries
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Country: Sweden
Released: December 1956
Runtime: 91 minutes
Genre: Drama
Studio: AB Svensk
Influenced: Terence Malick, Bob Rafelson, Scorsese, Lars Von Trier, Agnieszka Holland, Pedro Almodóvar
Aged 37, "nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita", Bergman made Wild Strawberries while in distress, laid up in hospital with an ulcer. After three failed marriages, his relationship with actress Bibi Andersson – who stars in this film – was also now breaking down. Stress from a hectic film and theatre schedule – he'd just put on a successful production of Peer Gynt – was also bearing down on Bergman. Wild Strawberries was made with a view to Bergman trying to understand his parents. Veteran actor and director Victor Sjöström was cast in the lead role of Professor Isak Borg. Sjöström was an early supporter of Bergman and helped to launch his career. The film is so powerful because Bergman identifies strongly with the main character (it's no coincidence they have the same initials, IB).
The film delves deep into the human psyche, depicting dreams and nightmares that Bergman himself experienced. The first in the film pays tribute to German expressionism and also Sjöström's only silent cinema masterpiece, The Phantom Carriage, and the symbols we see in the dream are harbingers of death. The image of Isak Borg in the coffin pulling himself into it is chilling. Early on, we see the film evolve into a road movie, with Isak stating his intention to travel by car from Stockholm to Lund, where he is due to pick up an honorary degree in medicine at the university. In his home life, and in his relationship with his housekeeper Agda, we see a different side to Isak the successful scholar, an old man who needs a mother figure to help him navigate his daily life.
Joining him on the road trip is his pregnant daughter-in-law Marianne, who like him is unfulfilled and yearning for affection. Their conversation helps us learn more about the complex Borg family relations, with Isak coming across as unsympathetic and domineering. In this way Isak is similar to Bergman's actual father, a prominent pastor in Stockholm who also ruled the family home with rigid discipline. Stopping off at his childhood summer home, Isak encounters some wild strawberries that cause him to reminisce about his upbringing. In this reverie, Isak sees his cousin Sara (played by Bibi Andersson) who he had a crush on as a kid. The strawberries seem to symbolise summer and the brighter days of life, as they do in The Seventh Seal, but in this scene Isak is like the ghost of Christmas past.
The reverie is broken by the appearance of Bibi Andersson again, this time as a different character (also called Sara), who is hitchhiking to Italy with her friends Anders and Viktor. They come along for the ride. The easy confidence of 1950s Sara around men is in contrast to the earlier Sara, who treats the two prospective lovers in her life with awe, demonstrating how women became more sexually liberated after WWII. Stopping by a beautiful lake to have an informal brunch, Isak recites a poem by Johan Olof Wallin: "Where is the friend I seek at break of day? When night falls, I still have not found Him. My burning heat shows me His traces. I see His traces whenever flowers bloom. His love is mingled with every air. His voice calls in the summer wind."
Along the journey, Isak is faced with several regrets – not falling in love with Sara, moving away from his hometown where he was well-loved and growing old and dissatisfied – and also the accusation from Sara, while being forced to look in the mirror, that "you know so much, and you don't know anything". Another nightmare follows where Isak arrives at the university to find an austere room where the characters of his road trip so far sit in unsmiling silence and where roles have been reversed, with Isak himself subjected to the stern and callous cruelty that he once meted out to others. This is followed by Isak witnessing his wife's infidelity.
The film's only flashback features Marianne and her husband Evald, having an argument in the rain, after which Marianne confesses to Isak that she feels lonely in this cold, dark world. Isak now seems more sympathetic in his responses to Marianne. On arrival in Lund, Isak is met by Agda at Evald's house, and witnesses a sort of reconciliation between Marianne and Evald. Isak also seeks greater warmth in his relationship with Agda, but is gently rebuffed, though there's a teasing invitation when she says she'll leave the door ajar. Isak is also bid farewell by Sara, who tells him she'll love him "today, tomorrow, always", the words he always wanted to hear from his cousin Sara when he was young. The film closes with a reconciliation between father Isak and son Evald, a final recollection of happier childhood times at the summer villa, the sight of his mother and father in harmony and a serene smile on Isak's face.
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