Fanny and Alexander

Year 13, Day 17 - 1/17/21 - Movie #3,719

BEFORE: This is it, the end of the Bergman chain - this ran in December 2020 on TCM, and really was the last piece of the puzzle, in several ways. (If TCM hadn't run it, I would have had to watch on iTunes or work something else out...).  Bergman's last significant work was made as a five-hour miniseries for Swedish television, and the episodes were cut down and stitched together to make a long film for theatrical release in other countries.  But if I can make it through this three-hour epic, then I'm done with Ingmar and his filmography, I covered the important films, I think, so I'll never have to come back this way and watch them again.  It's been a struggle, but it's also a relief now that it's over.  And I won't have to watch another Swedish film with subtitles for - well, not for another 10 days at least.  I'm going to circle back to more modern Swedish films again before the end of the month.  

(I've realized too late that there are a couple of connections between Bergman's filmography and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" - one actor from "Scenes From a Marriage" also appears in that 2009 Swedish film, and one key actress from today's film also has a role.  It seems no matter how much research I do on cast lists, I still miss connections sometimes.  So I could go straight from here to there, but then I'd miss the 11 films in-between, and my January schedule would come up short.  Still, I should have caught this - I blame the Swedish language and all its little umlauts and other strange symbols...)

Erland Josephson carries over again from "Autumn Sonata".  This is Erland's fifth Bergman film, meaning he's tied with Liv Ullmann somehow.  But they both got beat by Gunnar Björnstrand, who appeared in 6 of the 9 Bergman films I watched.  I'm lucky that at the end, Bergman still cast a few of his old regulars, because this film contains, mostly, a ton of actors with no previous Bergman credits.  I guess when he suddenly went from small, intimate films with just four or five actors to something with a cast of hundreds, that's to be expected.  It couldn't possibly be that Bergman was thinking "Hey, just in case 40 years from now, if some guy is watching all of my significant films in chronological order, and he's obsessed with linking them by actors for some strange reason, I want to make things really difficult for THAT guy."

THE PLOT: Two young Swedish children experience the many comedies and tragedies of their family, the Ekdahls.  

AFTER: This is a gigantic story with a lot of moving parts - in some ways it's very much like the antique shop seen late in the film, with rooms and rooms full of just STUFF, most of which is not important in any way but is just taking up space in the shop, and then once in a while you might something important in there, that speaks to you personally, but those things might be few and far-between. Then there's just this room full of Japanese mannequins or giant puppet heads and that just leads to more questions.

But let me back up a bit - the first third of this film is set in a big Swedish multi-level house with an extended family of Ekdahls, and they all seem pretty well off.  Oscar Ekdahl manages the local theater in Uppsala, his wife Emelie is an actress and his mother Helena is a former actress.  It's Christmas time, and the extended family hosts a big Christmas dinner to be delivered to the actors after the big Christmas pageant, then of course a party that goes on until the wee hours of the morning, and through this we learn about the various relationships and goings-on, like Oscar's brother Gustav has a regular illicit relationship going on with Maj, one of the family's maids. His wife, Alma, seems pretty OK with it, though.  

Everything seems rather idyllic for a while - this is perhaps semi-autobiographical, as Bergman is probably represented here by Alexander, and I've seen reports where he's quoted as having grown up as a child of privilege, but spending a lot of time by himself, with a similar "magic lantern" as a toy - also a gateway drug of sorts to the art of filmmaking.  There's about a dozen kids growing up in this big house, or was this just visiting family members crashing there after the Christmas party?  I'm not sure. Either way, it's a big family with a lot of people to keep track of, and a lot of servants, too.  

But since this is a Bergman film, the good times can't last - I suspect they're only there in the first place to provide contrast.  Oscar the theater manager collapses on stage during a "Hamlet" rehearsal, it seems he's had a stroke, and he's brought home to circle the drain.  The doctor visits and says it's "just a matter of hours" - what a sad state of medical care there must have been in 1907.  Oscar's children, Fanny and Alexander, are brought to his bedside so he can say goodbye to them.  

Shortly thereafter, Fanny and Alexander witness their dead father in a white suit, playing the piano in the drawing room.  It's unclear if this is a dream sequence, or a ghost, or what - but it won't be the last time we see the deceased Oscar.  Emilie makes plans to marry Edvard, the local bishop and a widower, and everything changes for Fanny and Alexander. (It's really all about Alexander, Fanny is superfluous, more or less.)  The children move into the bishop's house, which is quite austere, there are no luxurious furnishings, no lavish parties, very few toys and zero fun.  Also living in the house are the bishop's mother, sister, obese and immobile aunt, and three maids, one of which seems friendly at first, but is really very cruel.  

The contrast between the Ekdahl house and the bishop's house is really stark and overblown, plus this is no place for kids to have fun, and then when Alexander invents a ghost story, he's severely punished for it, because the maid takes it to mean that he thinks the bishop murdered his wife and daughters.  Plus, as we all know, there are no such things as ghosts - or are there?  Oscar, who is deceased, puts in another appearance to visit his mother.  

Emelie soon realizes she can't change the bishop, she can't make his house more fun and cheery, and she's made a huge mistake.  But the bishop won't grant her a divorce, and if she leaves that's desertion under Swedish law, so the bishop would get custody of her children.  To make matters worse, she's pregnant with the bishop's child.  While Emilie is away, the bishop takes the opportunity to verbally entrap and physically punish Alexander. 

It's with the help of a rabbi (who's got some kind of relationship with the Ekdahl matriarch?) that the children are smuggled out of the bishop's house.  He pulls a kind of scam/magic trick that I didn't fully understand - like the whole ghost thing, I'm not sure this was properly explained.  (If the kids were in the chest, then how did the bishop also see them in the locked bedroom?)  But this leads to the third stage of the film, where Fanny and Alexander live with the rabbi and his two nephews in that giant antique store.  Emilie has to resort to desperate measures to be able to leave the Bishop's house, otherwise he would simply never let her go.

This can't be completely autobiographical, of course - I've learned that Ingmar Bergman's father wasn't a theater manager, he was a Lutheran minister, married to a former nurse.  So Bergman's father is probably the template for the step-father here.  Ingmar lost a taste for religion when he was eight, though, which is about when he discovered theater, and put on his own puppet-show versions of Strindberg plays. Obviously there was a rift between him and his conservative/strict father, and this is reflected in Alexander dealing with his father's death, and then wishing that his step-father would also die.  

Wikipedia says the themes here are about magic and reality - at one point, Alexander's mother clearly states that "There are no ghosts", but this is in conflict with Alexander and Helena both interacting with Oscar's ghost.  Or dreaming about it, whichever.  Or maybe this is just the way that Bergman/Alexander remembers things, many years later, it's tough to say.  Ghost Oscar wears white and the step-father wears black, so that could represent good and evil, but then the dead man is "good" and the alive minister is "evil".  A bold statement, but so be it.  There's also a bit of a tie-in with "Hamlet", as Oscar played the ghost of Hamlet's father on the stage, and then of course the scenario is similar, with Emilie/Queen Gertrude getting married again to an evil man, while the ghost of her dead husband is still hanging around.  Emilie plainly states, "I'm not Queen Gertrude, your kind stepfather is no king of Denmark..." which means, of course, that she totally is.  "Fanny and Alexander" borrows a bit of its framework from "Hamlet", as did "Strange Brew", which starred Max von Sydow, and that's just about where I came in on this chain a week ago.

Then there's religion, obviously, and the Bishop's stark, austere Protestant living style standing in such sharp contrast to the Ekdahl's extravagant Lutheran (?) Christmas celebration.  (You can think of the Ekdahl's Christmas as the one you celebrated in 2019, and then the Bishop's house maybe represents all the fun you didn't have in 2020.) Then there's the "magical Jew" being used as a plot device when the Rabbi helps free the children from the Bishop's house.  

But less seems to be written about the fact that one of Isak's adult nephews is played by a female actress, and the Bishop's obese aunt is played by a male actor.  What are we to make of this, in a story set in 1907?  Was there some androgyny even back then in Sweden?  When I was a kid in the 1970's, I remember that Sweden was recognized as the place people would travel to if they wanted a sex-change operation, so maybe they've always just been ahead of the curve on this topic?  

On a personal level, there are some things I did identify with here - my father became a Catholic deacon while I was growing up, so the church was always forced on me as a big part of life.  My parents belonged to a secular Franciscan order, too, so the second Saturday of every month was always "extra church" in downtown Boston for us.  I managed to get through it by sitting at the organ with my mother and turning the pages of music for her.  But like Bergman, I also broke with the faith as soon as I could, to start thinking for myself, and it was around the time that I discovered theater and then film as a substitute for religion.  Bergman had his "magic lantern", and I had a little Fisher-Price personal movie viewer that played cartoons on loops in little cartridges.  I'd watch the film frame-by-frame so I could figure out how Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse was made to move the way he did.  Then "Star Wars" came along and my little kiddie head exploded.  Sure, I ended up working in filmmaking, but why wasn't I ever as successful as Bergman was?  I guess because NYU film school taught me that I didn't really have the big narrative inspiration, or the work ethic, necessary to push my own ideas and projects forward - besides, I was always copying other filmmaker's ideas, anyway.  

This film represents a magnificent achievement, however, it's still much too long for a feature film. Anyway, I'm done with the Bergman marathon, 9 films in 7 days and honestly, it's a big relief now.  I'll never have to watch these again unless I want to, and right now I sure don't.  Instead I'm going to take a break and watch the first two episodes of "WandaVision" on Disney Plus before my next movie.  I can't really stop, because I'm still planning to cram 34 movies into the month of January (hey, what else do I have to do at this point, to pass the time?), but I can at least break for some TV.  

Also starring Gunn Wallgren, Jarl Kulle, Mona Malm, Angelica Wallgren, Maria Granlund, Kristian Almgren, Emelie Werkö, Allan Edwall, Ewa Fröling, Bertil Guve, Pernilla Allwin, Börje Ahlstedt, Christina Schollin, Sonya Hedenbratt, Käbi Laretei, Majlis Granlund, Svea Holst, Kristina Adolphson, Siv Ericks, Inga Alenius, Eva von Hanno (also carrying over from "Autumn Sonata"), Pernilla August (last seen in "Filmworker"), Lena Olin (last seen in "The Reader"), Gösta Prüzelius, Hans Straat, Carl Billquist, Axel Düberg, Olle Hilding, Jan Malmsjö (last seen in "Scenes From a Marriage"), Kerstin Tidelius, Hans Henrik Lerfeldt, Marianne Aminoff (also last seen in "Autumn Sonata"), Harriet Andersson (last seen in "Cries and Whispers"), Linda Krüger, Pernilla Wahlgren, Peter Stormare (last heard in "The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature"), Stina Ekblad, Mats Bergman, Gerd Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand (also carrying over from "Autumn Sonata"), Heinz Hopf, Sune Mangs, Nils Brandt, Per Mattsson, Anna Bergman, Licka Sjöman, Ernst Günther, Hugo Hasslo.  

RATING: 6 out of 10 whacks from a cane