“Wild Strawberries” (1957)
If you want to disrupt someone’s misbegotten idea of Bergman as a miserabilist (off-topic: is Woody Allen’s reverence for Bergman’s “seriousness” perhaps the worst thing to have happened to Bergman’s legacy in terms of recruiting new adherents?) and “Smiles of a Summer Night” or “Fanny and Alexander” don’t spring to hand, let us suggest “Wild Strawberries,” as, if not his happiest film, then the one that is most surprisingly uplifting. We could assume otherwise, given the themes of aging and regret, and yet it’s a film whose mood evolves outward, and upward, before finally opening up later on like a flower that blossoms at night. Aging Professor Isak Borg (played brilliantly by great Swedish director Victor Sjostrom) decides on a whim to drive to the ceremony being given in his honor at his old University. The grouchy, self-confessed pedant is accompanied by his flinty daughter-in-law, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin). And along the way, Borg’s nightmares, dreams and memories are sparked by people he meets, in particular a “Jules et Jim“-esque threesome of hitchhikers in which the young girl, played by Bibi Andersson,who also plays Borg’s remembered ex-sweetheart, is torn between the affections of the two contrasting men. The Expressionist reveries can feel a little on the nose now, and the cinematography, by “The Seventh Seal“’s Gunnar Fischer, is heavier and more deliberate than the lithe deceptive naturalism of Sven Nykvist’s style, if no less luminous. But really what these episodes serve to illustrate is Borg’s gradual, sometimes painful, shucking off of the regret and guilt that could easily overwhelm a man of his age. Calling to mind everything from “King Lear” to Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” to Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” “Wild Strawberries” occasionally creaks but still builds to a warm, emotional climax with an unusual perspective on acceptance as a route not merely to contentment, but to genuine joy. And as such, it’s simply one of the greatest, gladdest films about old age ever made.
“The Seventh Seal” (1958)
Say the words ‘Ingmar’ and ‘Bergman’ to the average person, and it’s likely that they’ll think of the image of a knight playing chess with Death on a beach (if those two words mean anything at all). “The Seventh Seal” is, thanks to parodies from everyone from Woody Allen to “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” his most familiar work to a general audience, even if they’ve never actually seen it. But the film is far, far more significant its inclusion of one of the most iconic and influential scenes in cinema history. Based on his play “Wood Painting,” and according to Bergman made “under difficult circumstances in a surge of vitality and delight,” the film stars Max von Sydow in the first of his eleven collaborations with the director as a medieval knight who returns to plague-ridden Denmark after the Crusades with squire Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrandt), only to encounter Death (Bengt Ekerot), who he challenges to a chess match in an attempt to prolong his life and accomplish one last meaningful act. Satisfyingly tackling most of the director’s favorite themes —mortality, faith, the pain of existence— through a prism of poetic imagery that feels closer to Chaucerian parable or a sacred mural than anything that cinema was producing at the time or since, von Sydow’s search for God and goodness is set against a medieval landscape that feels positively apocalyptic, thanks to the gorgeously austere photography by Gunnar Fischer. It’s sincere, almost puritan work, and yet for all its reputation as an oblique and alienating work, it can be disarmingly funny and always maintains the humanism of Bergman’s earlier pictures (in part thanks to the lightness and charm delivered by the family of actors who von Sydow and Bjornstandt encounter). By the time the knight departs, doing a ‘dance of death,’ it’s clear that Bergman has not just been talking about what it is to die but what it is to live.
“The Virgin Spring” (1960)
Bergman worked in many forms, but probably thanks to the way “The Seventh Seal” permeated pop culture, his oeuvre feels most closely associated (especially if you don’t know his filmography all that well) with the fable. But of the several times he essayed this type of story —one that begs to be read on allegorical levels, with the characters being more important for the ideas they represent than for their human personalities— he never did so with more clarity and simplicity than with “The Virgin Spring,” winning the first of his three Foreign Language Film Oscars as a result. The unusually linear and comprehensible story, especially in light of thickets of interpretations thrown up by films like ‘Seventh Seal’ or ‘The Silence,’ is based on an old Swedish ballad. It tells of the rape and murder of Karin (Birgitta Peterson), beloved daughter of local landowner Tore (von Sydow) and his wife, Mareta (Birgitta Valberg), which is witnessed by her surly, pregnant servant Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom). Karin’s assailants seek shelter in Tore’s home, where they unwittingly betray themselves, leaving Tore to exact revenge. But there are recognizably Bergmanian flourishes: the relationship between Karin and Ingeri is fractured along sexual, class and religious lines, between Karin’s “purity,” elevated status and Christianity, and Ingeri’s sensuality (Lindlblom’s one-note glowering wild child is a rare performance misstep in Bergman’s canon), lowly birth and paganism. Yet the pious, goodnatured Karin is also vain and spoiled, and the resentful wildling Ingeri is wracked with guilt over the attack, so the moral divide between the two is blurred. Add to that Sven Nykvist’s near-miraculous photography, and Von Sydow’s commanding yet internalized performance, and “The Virgin Spring” is a compelling access point to Bergman’s more complex investigations elsewhere. Alone among Bergman’s films, it also inspired an exploitation-horror remake with “Last House on the Left.”
“Through A Glass Darkly” (1961)
It’s difficult to discuss any of the films in Bergman’s deeply resonant trilogy of faith without seeing them as a whole; an anguished series of stories steeped in existential crises about belief, love and the meaning of life itself. All of the pictures take place in isolated, single setting locations, crystallizing the interior claustrophobia of Bergman’s emotionally-charged chamber dramas, and all can be cold, austere watches. Pitched in a minor key, “Through A Glass Darkly” centers on a slow and painful disintegration; a family vacationing at a summer home on the island of Fårö (Bergman’s favorite locale where he exiled himself for many years) trying to cautiously cope with the elephant in the room: the deteriorating mental state of the family’s eldest daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson) who has suffered a nervous breakdown. Von Sydow plays her empathetic doctor husband trying to put on the brave face, Gunnar Björnstrand is her detached, emotionally distant father who’s often cared about his writing career more than his own children and Minus (Lars Passgård) is the emotionally troubled, sexually insecure younger sibling who’s never received his father’s approval. As they attempt to celebrate Karin’s return from a psychiatric hospital, the delicate fissures in the family dynamic begin to show; Karin begins to hear voices and believes a spider in the wall is God. Theatrical in nature, the quietly harrowing picture culminates in an even more incarcerated milieu that makes a disquieting allusion to incest. “Through A Glass Darkly” suggests that Bergman’s genius (much like that of Robert Bresson) is in how he extracts maximum bruising emotional effect from simple set-ups and inspired staging, and the Academy agreed: the picture won the 1962 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Bergman’s second Oscar.
