Smultronstället

Ingmar Bergman (1957)

Wild Strawberries distils the life of Professor Isak Borg, through the day on which he reaches a professional pinnacle, receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Lund.  Now in his late seventies, the professor, en route to the ceremony, passes through landscapes of his past – actual and imagined.  The journey is interspersed with daydreams, nightmares and memories so intense that Borg actually observes the people and events of his youth, as they were fifty years ago, in the locations he now revisits.   On the road to Lund, the professor and his daughter-in-law pick up three young hitchhikers – an engaged couple and their male companion.   The girl, Sara, is played by the same actress who plays her namesake – and Borg’s missed opportunity for happiness – in the scenes of his stepping back into his past.  The professor also gives a lift to a middle-aged couple, whose car is written off after a near collision with his:  locked in a hair-raising vicious circle of loathing, they’re last seen standing side by side in the middle of the road (although the actors playing the couple reappear, in different guises, in a later dream sequence) – with only themselves for company and no way of getting further.    Borg pays a call on his shrunken, grimly humorous ninety-six year old mother; when he arrives in Lund, he stays with his son Evald, the only child of a (we’re told) loveless marriage – and an inheritor of his father’s chilly misanthropy to such an extent that Evald cannot tolerate the fact of his wife’s pregnancy, of bringing a child into a world that he finds hateful.    He seems to prefer the prospect of death to life – a prospect to which Borg’s mother seems resigned but of which the professor, on the evidence of his dreams, is increasingly fearful.

Wild Strawberries is an outstanding example of how Bergman’s art as a filmmaker transforms the monolithic obsessions underlying his work.   His sexual stereoptying, in particular, is largely unvarying.   Intellectual males in Bergman are egotistical, unkind, scared of death; they agonise over the (non-)existence of God.   The two young male hitchhikers – one a scornfully atheistic medic, the other an aspiring parson – appear to reflect the split in Professor Borg’s (and his creator’s) own mind.    Working men or men of action may be capable of less selfish, more generous and life-affirming impulses – so the polar opposite of Borg’s son is Henrik Åkerman, a garage mechanic, happy in his marriage and that his wife is expecting a baby.  Evald and the mechanic are played by Gunnar Björnstrand and Max von Sydow respectively.  Although Bergman has sometimes cast them against this type, the actors’ looks and sensibilities make them naturally right for these parts – at the same time, they enlarge the conception of their roles.  Björnstrand has such an ability to express what is happening inside a character’s head that he gives a new meaning to the idea of someone speaking their mind:  his concentrated impatience and icy cafard here are electrifying.  The potential to play a hero is there in von Sydow’s face and height – but it’s his core of unpretentious, humanising sanity that makes his heroes admirable and memorable.  When he’s playing an ‘ordinary’ man as here, he makes the ordinariness luminous.  (The two young actors playing the hitchhikers aren’t capable of this alchemy.)

The director shows some sympathy with – eventually some sentimentality towards – the professor;  rightly or wrongly, you get the sense that this is because of what Victor Sjöström meant to Bergman (what he already meant in the history of Swedish cinema, and what the personal relationship that developed in the making of Wild Strawberries came to mean).   The power of Sjöström’s performance consists in both his getting into and being greater than the character of Borg:  the fact that he played this part when himself an old, ill man (he died in 1960) makes it seem as if Sjöström was prepared to face death in a way that the professor isn’t.  His acting is wonderfully simple and complete (almost as if he’s too old to pretend).

Wild Strawberries also demonstrates Bergman’s peerlessly intuitive casting and direction of actresses, even though his conception of women – in the parts that he writes rather than the performances he gets – is inherently condescending.  He often presents women as on the receiving end of male emotional cruelty rather than as independent natures;  their complexity is a function of ‘otherness’ rather than of intelligence;  they’re spiritually supple and creative largely because they’re utterly different from men.   So the twin Saras, life-loving and artless, are saved by Bibi Andersson’s vividness and humour;  the affectionately scolding relationship between Borg and his septuagenarian housekeeper works because of the physical solidity and sensual vigour that Jullan Kindahl embodies;   the gravely beautiful mask of the badly-treated daughter-in-law is animated by the emotional truth that Ingrid Thulin transmits – especially when she absorbs, in silent horror, the cold-eye-on-life-on-death cast by the professor’s mother.   This role is startling not just because of Naima Wifstrand’s psychic and physical presence – a dead soul, a skull in waiting – but because this is an exceptional Bergman woman.  Bergman is as unforgiving to her as he is to most of his male characters (but without the self-indulgence that often seems to underlie his treatment of men).  Professor Borg’s mother appears to be the progenitor of the life-denying selfishness that has been transmitted to her son and grandson – she’s a powerfully subversive counterbalance to the implication elsewhere in Wild Strawberries that giving birth means new life.

Bergman’s transformative skills extend to his reiterating and juxtaposing images in ways that create layers and momentum.  A few minutes into Wild Strawberries, Borg has a nightmare:  the design of the sequence and the way it develops fuse film storytelling with the texture, movement and rhythm of a dream in an amazing way  – even though the ‘meaning’ of what we see (death is coming for the professor and he’s scared) is very obvious.   A later daydream – similarly easy to decode – seems to go on too long; you begin to feel that constructing sequences of this kind comes very easily to Bergman.  But the accumulating power of his method is irresistible – as is the correspondence between having a dream and the act of watching Wild Strawberries.  The mysterious power of Professor Borg’s nightmare, as we experience it, is disproportionate to its interpretation (and this actually makes it all the more convincing as a dream).  The big themes preoccupying Bergman – birth and death (and fear of both), time and memory – may not be, in intellectual terms, greatly sophisticated.  But their development on screen is unforgettable.

5 September 2008