#ingrid thulin
Terminally sick, sexually frustrated literary translator Ester (Ingrid Thulin), her sensual younger sister Anna (Gunnel Lindblom; bathtub) and Anna’s 10-year-old son Johan (Jörgen Lindström) drift through a fictional Central European country on the brink of war in the chilling psychodrama The Silence (1963, Ingmar Bergman)
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Wild Strawberries (1957)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography by Gunnar Fischer
“When you were little you belived in Santa Claus, now you belive in God.”
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“I can’t imagine a worse thing than getting old”
Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries is (somewhat correctly) noted as being one of his most optimistic films, yet, as with much of the great Swedish director’s body of work, its themes are not entirely clear-cut. Wild Strawberries is, in this regard, one of Bergman’s more simplistic films, but it’s also one of the greatest works of his career.
The film follows Isak, a stubborn 78 year old doctor, as he travels across country to be given an honorary doctorate to mark his fifty year contribution to medicine. Along the way, he is confronted by the mistakes he made with his family and strives to change his ways.
Wild Strawberries is a film set up much like Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It follows the reaffirmation of a man who is respected but not loved. But the difference is that Bergman never explicitly shows Isak’s mistakes and flaws like Dickens does Ebenezer Scrooge. His parental failures are mentioned in passing, but only the good sides of his personality are placed on the screen, and this biased depiction of the character allows us to sympathise more with his plight.
It is this simple fact that makes Wild Strawberries a very different film to, say, The Seventh Seal, Bergman’s other film from 1957. Wild Strawberries opens with a man shrouded in bitterness, loneliness and resignation, and documents his reaffirmation of life; The Seventh Seal, on the other hand, opens with disillusioned yet shrewd man who believes he can save his own life by beating Death in a game of chess, which he cannot do.
This is not to say that Wild Strawberries is a better film - both are extraordinary - but it is a film that shows Bergman in unusually optimistic spirits, and one that cements his status as one of cinema’s truest artists.
Simultaneously depressing and uplifting, Wild Strawberries is not just an existential road movie, but the existential road movie, and justifiably one of Bergman’s most celebrated cinematic achievements.
Ingrid Thulin-Paolo Colombo “Agostino” 1962, de Mauro Bolognini.
