Wild Strawberries [DVD]

Typical Bergman full of nuances!

I first saw Wild Strawberries on Saturday night TV when I was about 15. I watched it with my father. Where everybody else was that night I don't remember. We watched it alone in silence. Bergman, black-and-white images, Nordic landscapes, the sing-song cadences of the incomprehensible language, blonde Swedish beauty (Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson) — visual information beamed into our California home from the dark side of the moon.The film ended. My dad got up and went to bed silently. Whatever the film said or didn't say to him I never heard, the secret locked away in the vault of his heart.What did it say to me? I can't remember exactly. What can 15 years on this planet teach you about anything? But it must have taught me something. It must have suggested my little world was not the only one. There are different ways of seeing and feeling, different textures in what we call the fabric of life. I remember sensing this, though there wasn't any way I could have put it into words. I remember how foreign Sweden looked and how its foreignness did not frighten me. If any thing, it thrilled me.As time passed the beauty of Ingrid haunted me. How does a woman become that beautiful and why doesn't her husband (played by Gunnar Bjornstand) love her for that beauty?She carried his baby. Good news, surely. No, not for Gunnar. He frowned and became surly and sulky when she told him. The child would be miserable, he said, just as he had been. Man hands on misery to man, said Philip Larkin, and there are times when we know this to be true.The elderly father/professor (played movingly by Victor Sjostrom) has lived selfishly. His career has been important, which means his standing in the academic/intellectual community. His accomplishments have been noticed, feted, honoured. He travels now with Ingrid by car from Stockholm to Lund to receive another award. But on the way he is sidetracked by all manner of things: summer daydreams of his carefree youth, scraps of conversation from his past, nightmares filled with Freudian symbolism, hitchhikers, a feuding couple they give a lift to after the couple's minor car wreck. Sauntering along the road to Canterbury, he becomes a whimsical Chaucerian character.What does it all mean? By the end we understand, and so does Victor. His long life has been lived, but not lived wisely, perceptively. He has chased the wrong things, the things he thought were important but weren't, while the things that were he neglected. How can he be forgiven for this? Why should he be?Ingrid, as it happens, becomes his angel, a loving emissary of sorts between heaven and hell. She carries, despite everything, love in her heart for him and for Gunnar, and it is this — this love — that will transform everything around her.

Bergman is one of my favourite movie directors. If i have to choose one it is definitively Bergman. It is all about people and their daily concerns. It is about life itself or lives which have been lived but of which the leading person wished he could have lived it otherwise. Victor Sjöström is acting on a high level here. Ingrid Thulin as well. She shines. It is a very emotional film. The dream sequences are very beautiful and heartbreaking. Bibi Andersson is so sweet and she brings joy to the movie with her two male comrades on their way to Italy. The closure of the movie left me breathless and deeply impressed. This is a true heartbreaking Bergman masterpiece.

Another classic from the Swede

The film is excellent. There was a fault with my first purchase, which the seller dealt with quickly and efficiently. Very courteous.

A moving and beautiful film, one of Bergman's most accessible. I had no problems with the DVD either. It plays fine, and no sting in the tail, e.g. no English subtitles.

Bergmanesque.

It is just as moving as it was all those years ago when we were young.