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It would be pointless to say that Ingmar Bergman made cinema history. That his death on July 30th of this 2007 (the same day as another cult figure in the cinematic realm, our Michelangelo Antonioni) left a void that cannot be filled. That his films will never age because they address universally significant themes, beyond the limits of time and space. That losing oneself in his genius, in the dreamlike atmospheres of his works inhabited by characters of touching humanity qualifies his cinema as something immortal. Despite all this preamble being literally banal, I feel compelled to do it simply to give a decent (perhaps even somewhat ritual) incipit to this review that aims to be a tribute to his greatness.
"Wild Strawberries" is a film from 1957, one of Bergman's most famous and appreciated works (among the awards received an Oscar for best original screenplay, Golden Bear in Berlin, the critics award in Venice). The protagonist is an old and eminent doctor, Isak Borg, who needs to go to Lund to be conferred an honor at the university of that city. The day before his departure, he dreams of a coffin overturning out of the funeral carriage and, dragged by a man, he manages to recognize in the dead man's features his own face. On the morning of his departure, he refuses to take the plane and communicates to his housekeeper his intention to leave by car, in the company of his daughter-in-law Marianne (The woman is in her father-in-law's house due to marital problems, as will be discovered later). From this moment on, Isak embarks on a reflection on his life (in particular his youth, in fact strawberries symbolize spring and, in a broader sense, youth), draws up a balance that manages to bring out positive and negative memories that intertwine in a meditative path of atonement, a personal "Way of the Cross" culminating in the emblematic academic honor.
During the journey, Isak encounters in the material reality and a parallel one a series of characters through which he retraces his existence backwards, penetrating into his past in the role of a specter of himself, confronting them until he understands the impossibility of finding a common ground between different ideas, the intrinsic impossibility in the unilateral, the incommunicability at the core of human relationships. When Isak relives the moment when his brother Sigfrid steals a kiss, years ago, from his beloved cousin Sara, who had made him vain promises of love, when he witnesses the seduction scene between his late wife and an old acquaintance, the protagonist is confronted with the impossibility of ever fully knowing other people, even those closest to us. Everyone is an inaccessible microcosm that will sooner or later clash with another but will never open up. The irreversible incompatibility that emerges during the quarrel between two spouses whom the protagonists pick up in their car after an accident, the disagreements among the three youths (two men and one woman, resembling cousin Sara) to whom Isak and Marianne give a lift, regarding the existence of God are other examples. The film concludes with a close-up of the protagonist, who falls asleep cradled by childhood memories, with a faintly sketched smile that seems to imply a conscious awareness of his approaching death, allowing him to find inner peace and sweep away the hysterics and vacuous and frantic attachment to materiality.
Bergman's filmography is dotted with difficult, sometimes cryptic works, but "Wild Strawberries" is an exception. It is a film about the beauty of life but also about its temporal limitations, about the loneliness it forces upon us, and it is in this context that the titanic nature of family love (as suggested by Isak's attempts to reconcile his daughter-in-law with his son) fits in.
An unmissable classic.
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