'Wild Strawberries' is the account by a 78-year old man of a day spent on the road with his unhappy daughter-in-law and three young hitch-hikers, as he travels to receive an honorary doctorate for 50 years service as a doctor, scientist and inventor. The film is full of bitterness and unhappiness - Marianne has left her emotionally congealed husband because he refuses to inflict a baby on the world (that old chestnut); they crash into and give a lift to a married couple who seem like refugees from a latter Bergman movie, lacerating in a sado-masochistic relationship. Isak Borg has a series of dreams and memories pointing out the emotional failures of his life. And yet the movie ends on a note of tranquillity and tentative reconciliation. all the old doom and gloom stuff that riddled earlier Bergman movies - God, death etc. - is wonderfully parodied in the figures of two male hitch-hikers whose metaphysical boxing matches sublimate frustrated desire for the third.
With hindsight, we can refract 'Strawberries' through the lens of its sister picture, Bergman's last masterpiece 'Fanny and Alexander'. In 'Strawberries', and old man looks back at his life, filmed by a young man; in 'Fanny', Bergman himself is the old man looking back at his youth. As with 'Fanny', not everything in this film is as it seems, and as with all Bergman films, what seems to be narratively transparent is actually a labyrinth strewn with mines for the unwary viewer.
We should remember at all times that 'Strawberries' doesn't unfold on an objective 'realistic' level, but is a memoir shaped by an old man with certain vested interests. Early on, his daughter-in-law accuses him of being an egoist behind his old-world charm, and we should remember this when faced with a resolution that seems to be brought about by his good offices. It is significant that Borg's reputation - for either goodness or failure - is not shown or proven to the audience, but discussed and analysed by other characters, both in the real life story and in the dreams and memories (i.e. he is analysing himself). In the very process at which he is supposed to be enlightening himself about his life's failure, he remains absent from life, a detached observer, not reaping emotional reward or pain because he has put himself mentally above them (literally, as a man lying alone in bed).
The movement of the film is actually quite negative. The film is that rare thing, a European road movie. Whereas the American variant is usually a journey into the unknown, the future, a journey of progress, Europe cannot offer that freedom, it is too small, too cluttered, too marked by history. So a European road movie, while seeming to go forward, is actually a journey backwards into the past. The physical landscape through which Borg drives is also a mental landscape, as he passes crucial personal landmarks, the summer house in which he was 'betrayed' by his fiancee, his mother's house, the petrol station whose owners he once helped.
Bergman is used to playing with layers of narrative reality, muddying the boundaries of dreams, wishes, reality etc. At the first stop, the summer house, Borg transforms, through memory, a physical landscape into the world of the past, as he watches his fiancee seduced by his brother, the key moment in his life that seemed to deaden him emotionally. This isn't even memory - he wasn't there - it is a projection, an imposing of his fantasy, his will on a truth he will never access. He is brought back to 'reality' by a young woman. Except this woman is played by the same actress as the one who played his fiancee, and they share the same name. this may be coincidence, or it may be part of the defence mechanism of a man who killed human contact with logic, the very logic with which he is writing this memoir we're watching, providing the redemption in which we're expected to believe (later, the petrol shop owners, in a real-world scene, are far too young to remember kindness from decades previously, suggesting narrative boundaries well and truly erased). This is before any of the 'official' dream sequences.
There is a logic, a progression. The film begins with a dream, where an old man sees his own death, having ordered his life in such a way that he remains alone, like his dad (Oedipal resonances not just in his dad's handless watch, but the blind eyes as a sign under it), and ends with a dream, with an old man returning to his birth, the sight of his father and mother, his younger self non-existent. The point before betrayal, before the messiness of life. Borg finds tranquillity in a dream of non-being. if this is happiness, reconciliation, peace, than God help us.
With hindsight, we can refract 'Strawberries' through the lens of its sister picture, Bergman's last masterpiece 'Fanny and Alexander'. In 'Strawberries', and old man looks back at his life, filmed by a young man; in 'Fanny', Bergman himself is the old man looking back at his youth. As with 'Fanny', not everything in this film is as it seems, and as with all Bergman films, what seems to be narratively transparent is actually a labyrinth strewn with mines for the unwary viewer.
We should remember at all times that 'Strawberries' doesn't unfold on an objective 'realistic' level, but is a memoir shaped by an old man with certain vested interests. Early on, his daughter-in-law accuses him of being an egoist behind his old-world charm, and we should remember this when faced with a resolution that seems to be brought about by his good offices. It is significant that Borg's reputation - for either goodness or failure - is not shown or proven to the audience, but discussed and analysed by other characters, both in the real life story and in the dreams and memories (i.e. he is analysing himself). In the very process at which he is supposed to be enlightening himself about his life's failure, he remains absent from life, a detached observer, not reaping emotional reward or pain because he has put himself mentally above them (literally, as a man lying alone in bed).
The movement of the film is actually quite negative. The film is that rare thing, a European road movie. Whereas the American variant is usually a journey into the unknown, the future, a journey of progress, Europe cannot offer that freedom, it is too small, too cluttered, too marked by history. So a European road movie, while seeming to go forward, is actually a journey backwards into the past. The physical landscape through which Borg drives is also a mental landscape, as he passes crucial personal landmarks, the summer house in which he was 'betrayed' by his fiancee, his mother's house, the petrol station whose owners he once helped.
Bergman is used to playing with layers of narrative reality, muddying the boundaries of dreams, wishes, reality etc. At the first stop, the summer house, Borg transforms, through memory, a physical landscape into the world of the past, as he watches his fiancee seduced by his brother, the key moment in his life that seemed to deaden him emotionally. This isn't even memory - he wasn't there - it is a projection, an imposing of his fantasy, his will on a truth he will never access. He is brought back to 'reality' by a young woman. Except this woman is played by the same actress as the one who played his fiancee, and they share the same name. this may be coincidence, or it may be part of the defence mechanism of a man who killed human contact with logic, the very logic with which he is writing this memoir we're watching, providing the redemption in which we're expected to believe (later, the petrol shop owners, in a real-world scene, are far too young to remember kindness from decades previously, suggesting narrative boundaries well and truly erased). This is before any of the 'official' dream sequences.
There is a logic, a progression. The film begins with a dream, where an old man sees his own death, having ordered his life in such a way that he remains alone, like his dad (Oedipal resonances not just in his dad's handless watch, but the blind eyes as a sign under it), and ends with a dream, with an old man returning to his birth, the sight of his father and mother, his younger self non-existent. The point before betrayal, before the messiness of life. Borg finds tranquillity in a dream of non-being. if this is happiness, reconciliation, peace, than God help us.