Themes: Golden Years, Fathers and Sons, Redemption
Main Cast: Victor Sjöström, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, Folke Sundquist
Release Year: 1957
Country: SE
Run Time: 90 minutes
Plot
After exploring his disillusionment with religion in his previous films, Ingmar Bergman adopted a humanistic approach for this classic study in isolationism. Legendary Scandinavian director Victor Sjöström stars as Isak Borg, an aging medical professor who reassesses his life while journeying to his former university to receive an honorary degree. Borg travels with his estranged daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) and revisits many of the landmarks of his past, conjuring up memories of his family and of his onetime sweetheart Sara (Bibi Andersson). Returning to the present, he meets a teenage girl who resembles the long-departed Sara. She hitches a ride with the professor and Marianne, as do a ceaselessly bickering married couple. These new characters eventually become intertwined with Borg's hazy flashbacks and fantasies, as the old man recalls the disappointments and disillusionments that have left him cold and guilt-ridden, attributes emphasized when he encounters his equally cold and resentful son. Bookending Borg's odyssey of self-discovery are a series of symbolic images at the beginning of the film (a clock without hands, a man without a face) and a hauntingly beautiful finale, in which professor is beckoned back to the "perfect" world he left behind so many years earlier. This classic art movie remains one of Bergman's most accessible films and one of the most influential European art movies of its generation. Its intense focus on one man's thoughts, regrets, and memories set the tone for innumerable psychological character studies in its wake. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Smultronstället/Wild Strawberries is one of the masterpieces of world cinema, a key early representative of the European art films that would change how people thought about movies in the late 1950s and 1960s. While the film posits a frightening questioning of life, it ultimately offers hope and redemption to its aging protagonist, and ultimately to us all. Director Ingmar Bergman effectively alternates emotional warmth with coldness to create one of the screen's greatest philosophical character studies. His shot composition is remarkable, particularly his close-ups of legendary Swedish director Victor Sjöström, here playing the elderly professor. The film is full of masterful symbolic imagery and allegorical storytelling. Most important, Bergman makes his film accessible to the ordinary viewer. This is a warm and human film, strongly filled with a richness rarely experienced on screen. ~ Richard Gilliam, All Movie Guide
Wild Strawberries is a 1957 film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, about an old man recalling his past. The original Swedish title is Smultronstället, which literally means "the wild strawberry patch", but idiomatically means an underrated gem of a place (often with personal or sentimental value). The cast includes Victor Sjöström in his final screen performance, as well as Bergman regulars Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnar Björnstrand. Max von Sydow also appears in a small role. Bergman wrote the screenplay while hospitalized.[1] Because it tackles difficult questions about life, and thought-provoking themes such as self-discovery and humanity's existence, the film is often considered to be one of Bergman's most emotional, one of his most optimistic, and one of his best.[2]
Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) is an elderly medical doctor and professor who drives with his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) from Stockholm to Lund to receive an honorary degree from Lund University. During the trip, he is forced by nightmares, daydreams, his old age, and his impending death to reevaluate his life. He meets a variety of people on the road, from Sara, a female hitcher traveling with her fiance and escort, to a quarreling married couple who remind Isak of his own life and marriage.
Ingmar Bergman and Victor Sjöström 1957 during production of Wild Strawberries in the studios in Solna.
The shooting took place between 2 July 1957 and 27 August 1957.[3] Contrary to popular belief, Sjöström was cast relatively late for the leading part, with Bergman not having any particular person in mind while writing the screenplay.[4] Bergman has described how he came up with the idea while driving from Stockholm to Dalarna, stopping in Uppsala where he had been born and raised, and driving by outside his grandmother's old house, when he suddenly began to think about how it would be if he could open the door and inside it would be just as it had been during his childhood. "So it struck me - what if you could make a film about this; that you just walk up in a realistic way and open a door, and then you walk into your childhood, and then you open another door and come back to reality, and then you make a turn around a street corner and arrive in some other period of your existence, and everything goes on, lives. That was actually the idea behind Wild Strawberries".[5]
The film is included on the Vatican Best Films List, recommended for its portrayal of a man's "interior journey from pangs of regret and anxiety to a refreshing sense of peace and reconciliation".[6]
The film also influenced Woody Allen’s 1988 dramaAnother Woman[7]. That film’s main character, Marion Post, is also accused by friends and relatives of being cold and unfeeling, which forces her to reexamine her life. Allen also borrows several tropes from Bergman’s film, such as having Post’s sister-in-law tell her that her brother, Paul, hates her, having a former student tell Post that her class changed her life, and Allen has Post confront the demons of her past via several dream sequences and flashbacks that reveal important information to a viewer, as in Wild Strawberries.
