216 - Wild Strawberries, 1957, Sweden. Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

Friday, August 4, 2017

216 - Wild Strawberries, 1957, Sweden.  Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

Dr. Isak Borg (initials I.B.) is about to receive a career achievement award, a kind of Professor Emeritus.

He was a distinguished doctor and professor of medicine for many years.  But he was difficult, and now he is alone.

His wife died years ago.  He lives with his maid, the maternal Miss Agda.

His dreams haunt him.

Winter, 1956.

Ingmar Bergman (initials I.B.) lies in the hospital with an ulcer.

He is going through a divorce.

Yet he is the director of the municipal theatre of Malma and churning out productions.  He writes the screenplay for Wild Strawberries and casts Victor Sjostrom to play the professor Dr. Isak Borg.

Sjostrom, you will recall, was the director of The Phantom Carriage (1921), the film which inspired Bergman as a young man to become a director and which gave him the character of the Grim Reaper, which he used in his own The Seventh Seal (1957).

Sjostrom directed many films.  He was one of the great founders of Swedish cinema, and he also came to America to direct silent classics for MGM, with stars such as Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, Conrad Nagel, and Lilian Gish.  He directed Lilian Gish as Hester Prynne in the 1926 version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

This week TCM aired Sjostrom's 1924 dramatic thriller, He Who Gets Slapped, starring Lon Chaney as a clown in a love triangle, with his own nemesis, a count, in possession of the woman he loves.

Yet Sjostrom was known more as an actor than a director, and after helping Bergman get started by producing Bergman's directorial debut Crisis (1946), he starred in two of Bergman's films--as the conductor Sonderby in his 1950 romantic drama To Joy and now as the professor in Wild Strawberries.

As the professor drives cross country to receive his award, the film becomes a road trip involving the passengers Borg picks up along the way and the continuing dreams and memories he encounters.

Borg has already dreamed of his own death, involving his own phantom carriage which crashes when its wheel and axle get caught on a lamppost, causing his coffin to fall out and break open.  He looks down at his own body, which awakens and reaches up to him.

Now on the trip he has more dreams and revisits memories in between the in-fighting in the car.

Dr. Borg is lonely and troubled and sad.  He feels acutely the emptiness of his life.  He questions whether his life in the end has had meaning.

In 1959, Bosley Crowther, writing for The New York Times, wrote that the film was too elusive to understand.

In 2014, Chuck Bowen, posturing cynically for Slant, wrote that the film's symbolism was too blunt to buy into (although he does set this up to praise him for an underlying subtlety).

Watch the film without any preconceived notions of Bergman.  Watch it without the baggage of our own current political-critical climate.

And find in it an empathy for what it means to be human.