Fanny och Alexander

Ingmar Bergman (1982)

Ingmar Bergman was a man of the theatre but the son of a Christian minister.  Fanny and Alexander is a continuous reminder of the world into which he was born and the world he chose to enter.  Compared to Bergman’s own life, the film – a blend of actual and imagined autobiography – reverses the order in which the two influences occur.  The reversal serves to stress Bergman’s love of theatre and antipathy towards organised religion.  His alter ego, ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), is a scion of the Ekdahl family, who run a theatre in Uppsala.  When his recently widowed, actress mother, Emilie (Ewa Fröling), marries the local bishop, Edvard Vergérus (Jan Malmsjö), Alexander and his younger sister, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin), are suddenly exiled from the warm, convivial life they’ve always known.  They’re virtual prisoners in the bishop’s house, where harsh Lutheranism holds sway:  much of the plot is concerned with how they and their mother escape the villain of the piece (his name announces, to Bergmaniacs anyway, the condition of the bishop’s soul[1]).  Once Vergérus is extinguished, the children’s earlier environment is largely, if not entirely, restored.  It will now be experienced with a new awareness of its fragility.

Fanny and Alexander was Bergman’s first made-in-Sweden work since Face to Face (1976).  The tax evasion controversy that engulfed him just before the release of Face to Face resulted in his leaving Sweden for West Germany, where he remained for several years.  (Autumn Sonata (1978), unlike the other films of this period, has a Swedish setting but was made through Bergman’s German production company and shot in Norway.)  Like Face to Face, Fanny and Alexander was conceived as a television drama but released in cinemas, in a shortened version, before it aired on TV:  the original theatrical release version runs 188 minutes, compared with the TV mini-series’ 312 minutes[2].  It was conceived, too, as Bergman’s last major screen work (although, in the event, it wasn’t his last cinema film:  After the Rehearsal (1984) and Saraband (2003), after being shown on Swedish television, received a theatrical release internationally).  It’s hard to ignore a parallel between the title characters’ dark time and overcoming of adversity, and Bergman’s own.  Alexander and Fanny are banished from but eventually return to the place where they belong.  Accused of crimes by the Swedish authorities, Bergman, despite being cleared, went into self-imposed exile before coming home to Sweden – and to his theatrical family.  The large cast of Fanny and Alexander includes, as well as one of his ex-wives (Käbi Laretei), several of the actors – Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Allan Edwall, Erland Josephson, Jarl Kulle – who helped Bergman make his name in the 1950s and sustain his standing as a film-maker through the 1960s and early 1970s.

These connections give an extra dimension to the piece, all the senior actors mentioned enrich it and Fanny and Alexander includes several superb passages.  These include the lengthy opening episode, set at Christmas in 1907, during which the Ekdahls gather for their traditional Christmas Eve party; and the lead-up and immediate aftermath to the death, a few months later, of Oscar Ekdahl (Allan Edwall).  He’s one of the three sons of Helena (Gunn Wållgren), the family matriarch who presides over the Christmas gathering. The party scenes teem with entertaining characters and eye-catching things – a cornucopia of food and drink, elaborate decorations, children’s toys.  The Ekdahls acknowledge the religious meaning of Christmas but their guests aren’t exclusively Christian:  Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson), Helena’s confidant and sometime lover, is emphatically Jewish.  And the goings-on at the party, and at the margins of the party, are far less sacred than profane.

Actor-manager Oscar is the only one of the three Ekdahl brothers who actually works in the theatre.  Offstage, this mild, self-effacing man is much less of a performer than his siblings – a chalk-and-cheese pair who, even so, are both typical examples of Bergman men behaving badly towards women, thanks to either unbridled lust or chronic self-loathing.  The insatiably libidinous Gustav Adolf (Jarl Kulle) is a successful restaurateur, the abject Carl (Börje Ahlsted) a penniless, washed-up academic.  Gustav Adolf, despite his infidelities, is happily married to generous, earthy, exceedingly tolerant Alma (Mona Malm):  she knows her husband’s having a fling with the housemaid Maj (Pernilla August) but she’s still fond of the girl.  Carl doesn’t have a mistress but rails miserably at his hapless German wife (Christina Sollin).  He deplores her smell, loathes her loyal forbearance and hates himself more than either.  He gives pleasure on Christmas Eve only in performing his party piece to Alexander, Fanny and other children:  Carl’s farts are potent enough to blow out candles.

Early in the following year, the theatre company is preparing for Hamlet, in which Oscar plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father.  During a rehearsal, he becomes disoriented and collapses, having suffered a stroke.  This is very well staged and played – ditto the frantically improvised transport of the stricken man back to the Ekdahl family home:  other members of the company have no option but to put Oscar on a cart and, with no horses available, to pull it themselves.  The scenes in Oscar’s bedroom and elsewhere in the house are impressive, too.  Alexander and Fanny do their school homework in the kitchen, sitting alongside two of the servants, Ester (Svea Holst) and Vega (Majlis Grandlund), whose friendly chatter supplies a semblance of normality.  The children are then summoned to Oscar’s deathbed.  He says goodbye to each of them, Fanny first.  When it’s Alexander’s turn, he tries in vain to hide under the bed.  He’s made to hold his father’s hand and is doing so when Oscar dies; hearing the death rattle, Alexander flees the room.  Still more terrifying to the boy are the sight and, especially, the sound of his mother’s grieving in the night.  (Fanny sees and hears, too, but the focus is more on Alexander’s reaction.)  Emilie’s screams are extraordinary:  they seem both rehearsed and out of control, occurring in a repeated rhythm but almost vomited, as if she were trying physically to get grief out of her system.  In contrast, the grimness of the subsequent funeral procession is almost comically alleviated by Alexander, who walks along, head down, muttering every swear word that he knows.  Bergman proved himself a master in the dramatisation of death and fear of death in films as stylistically diverse as The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957) and Cries and Whispers (1972).  The deathly sequences here show undiminished flair and invention – they’re the finest part of Fanny and Alexander.

After Oscar’s funeral, the story moves forward rapidly, carrying the children into a different kind of horror:  Bishop Vergérus (Jan Malmsjö gives him a memorable arctic suavity) is Emilie’s comforter one minute, her husband almost the next.  The film’s chief weakness is that it comes across as an overly conscious attempt on its maker’s part to deliver a summation of his life’s work in cinema and achieve a glorious swansong – an attempt that, ironically, turns Fanny and Alexander into less than typical Bergman.  (This may partly explain the kind of success that it enjoyed:  it fared very well commercially, in Sweden and abroad, and was the only Bergman picture ever to win multiple Academy Awards – four.)  When the bishop’s house becomes the main location and escape from it the narrative priority, the plotting is unusually detailed.  The story’s melodramatic momentum, in combination with a young protagonist who suffers and survives a character-forming ordeal, smacks of Victorian literature rather than classic Bergman.   This works well in one respect, though:  Vergérus’s bizarrely malignant household seems a Dickensian conception but the actors concerned give their characters a distinctly Bergmanish twist – especially Harriet Andersson as a ratty maid who not only claims the place is eating her but makes you believe what she says.

A few things feel like casualties of the process of compression of five hours of television into three hours of cinema (though I can’t say for certain – it’s a long time since I saw the TV version).  It’s hard to understand why Fanny shares title billing:  her role is wholly subsidiary to Alexander’s.  Carl and his wife disappear from the story without explanation.  The version of Bergman’s script published at the time of the original theatrical release explains that Oscar is not the biological father of Alexander and Fanny, who are the result of Emilie’s extra-marital affairs.  This isn’t made clear in the film though it does make sense of a kind  of emotional distance between Oscar and the children that isn’t stressed but is hard to ignore.  It also gives an additional layer of meaning to the family celebration, rhyming with the opening Christmas party, which closes the film – a dual christening, of two baby girls.  One is the child of Maj and Gustav Adolf.  The other is Emilie’s new daughter, a half-sister to Alexander and Fanny fathered by the now deceased bishop.  Both new babies are easily accepted into the Ekdahl family – presumably as Emilie’s two other children were before them.  That’s how open-minded and naturally loving these theatre folk are – at least, it suits Ingmar Bergman, the sire of nine children, born to six different women, to believe so.

As a paean to theatre, Fanny and Alexander is occasionally contrived and the only sequence that features a real theatre performance turns phoney.  After the curtain call for the company’s nativity play, before he and Emilie leave to attend the Christmas Eve party, Oscar, his voice thick with emotion, addresses the company backstage:

‘… I love this little world inside the thick walls of this playhouse and I’m fond of the people who work in this little world.  Outside is the big world, and sometimes the little world succeeds in reflecting the big one … so that we understand it better.  Or perhaps we give the people who come here a chance to forget for a while – for a few short moments, for a few short moments – the harsh world outside.  Our theatre is a little room of orderliness, routine, care and love.’

Although Allan Edwall invests it with real feeling, this speech rings not just false but, loud and clear, of Bergman sentimentalising his own passion for theatre and pretending to be ever so humble[3].  The Ekdahls’ theatre doesn’t answer to the description of a little world – it’s rather grand.  The nativity play has been performed to a full house, dressed up to the nines.  The whole setting screams opulence.  Fanny and Alexander’s Oscars were for Foreign Language Film, Sven Nykvist’s cinematography, the production design and the costumes.  The film’s remarkably high production values, part and parcel of Bergman’s determination to go out on a high, flatly contradict the words spoken by this other Oscar.

Bergman is much more persuasive in playing variations on the theme of theatre as make believe.  The seed for this is sown in the opening sequence, where Alexander is absorbed in his toy theatre, complete with miniature footlights.  Magic lanterns and, especially, puppets recur – the latter sometimes frighteningly – in the story.  In the bishop’s house, his grotesque, invalid sister, Elsa, is played by a man (Hans Henrik Lerfeldt).  In Isak Jacobi’s home, where Alexander takes refuge, one of Isak’s two nephews, Ishmael (like Elsa, sequestered), is played by a woman (Stina Ekblad).  During his time there, Alexander fantasises about Vergérus’s death; the mysterious Ishmael explains that fantasy can become reality.  Alexander’s tendency to invent – what the bishop most detests about him – has two sides:  telling lies and showing imagination (for Vergérus lying may even be the lesser of the two evils).  The dividing line between what Alexander sees and what he dreams, is blurred:  the ghost of Oscar – who, dressed in a white suit, reappears repeatedly and talks to the boy – is a case in point.  ‘Don’t play Hamlet, my son,’ Emilie warns Alexander (before the scales fall from her eyes and she realises her new husband is a fate worse than Claudius).  It’s a nice point as to whether or not Alexander, within the film’s narrative, does as he’s told.  It’s a safe bet that, since he’s a portrait of Ingmar Bergman in the making, the young hero will grow up to direct a Hamlet – and much, much more.

6 December 2022

[1] Vergérus is also the surname of chilly, narrow-minded men in The Magician (1958), The Passion of Anna (1969), The Touch (1971) and The Serpent’s Egg (1977) – and, legend has it, of an unkind film critic who upset Bergman early in his career.

[2] Although the complete, five-hours-plus version has subsequently been shown as a single film, it’s the ‘abridged’ Fanny and Alexander that still usually plays in cinemas – as per this latest BFI screening.

[3] It calls to mind his 1954 essay The making of film, in which Bergman describes the rebuilding of Chartres cathedral at the turn of the thirteenth century by ‘thousands of people [who] came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site.  … they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral …’.  Comparing himself to these artisans, he goes on to say that ‘if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. … I would play my part in the collective building of a cathedral’.  No one doubts that Bergman enjoyed collaborating with other creative people but the idea of this great, egocentric artist as just one of the team, let alone as ‘anonymous’, is hilarious.