Memory, Forgetting, Death and Life: Ingmar Bergman’s Odyssey

Wild Strawberries begins with a dream and ends with another. Upon the first, a nightmare, falls the shadow of death and the meaninglessness of time. In the second, Isak Borge, the 78-year-old celebrated man of science, goes back in his distant childhood to a sun-drenched day by the sea. This distance between death and life the old man traverses over the film’s 90 minutes, as he drives from Stockholm to Lund to receive an honorary university degree, now awake, now lost in a reverie, now reliving in his mind the pain of a broken relationship.

The honour means scarcely anything to him now, for he knows he will soon be dead. But the long journey through a tranquil, often incredibly beautiful countryside, in the company of a daughter-in-law to whom he has been lukewarm at best, transports him from emptiness and ennui to a coming-to-terms with life and its disappointments, heartbreaks and imperfections. Now that he knows he has little of it left, time begins to assume a new meaning for him. The lines on his face soften, become gentler. His steely coldness, which perhaps has fed into his life-long loneliness, slowly falls away from him. He dreams again of his childhood, full in the smile of the sun and the sea. His face glows as he dreams of his childhood.

Wild Strawberries was released in December 1957, just a few months after another Ingmar Bergman classic, The Seventh Seal (which had opened in February the same year), but it is not easy to think of two films so unlike one another in tone and flavour.

The Seventh Seal is a grim narrative of that apocalyptic moment in man’s history when life on earth seems on the point of extinction. The plague is sweeping across medieval Europe, and a knight and his squire, just returned from the Crusades to desolate Sweden, search for God but find nothing but emptiness and terror. Death pursues the Knight relentlessly, and, in the hope to buy time so that he may do at least one good deed that will give his life some meaning, the knight invites Death to a game of chess, which then plays out over the duration of the film. In the end, predictably, Death checkmates the knight. The film closes with a macabre dance of death in which the knight and his companions are all led away against a darkening sky. Surely nothing could be further from the world of The Seventh Seal than mid-summer-day Stockholm where the drama of estrangement and reconciliation, of thwarted love and despair, plays out in the under-stated fashion typical of the mid-20th century human?

But both films work at several different layers, and there are points of intersection between the two narratives on some of them. Essentially, both The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries foreground men near the ends of their lives, on a journey in search of meanings. In his own way, each man – the professor as much as the knight – arrives in the end at what he has been looking for. The dance of death notwithstanding, The Seventh Seal has the street performer Joseph, his wife Mary, and their young child survive Death’s ravages, to depart from the gnarled, scarred landscape in search of life. As he countenances death himself, the knight knows and rejoices in this. And in both films, wild strawberries serve as the abiding symbol of the continuity and renewal of life. As the professor revisits his childhood, his memory is redolent of freshly-plucked strawberries grown in the wild that he and his sweetheart would often gather. Equally, in The Seventh Seal, when the world-weary knight chooses to spend some time with Joseph and Mary, she brings him a bowl of wild strawberries and fresh milk. “I will remember this hour of peace,” says the knight. ‘’The dusk, the bowl of wild strawberries, the bowl of milk, Joseph with his lute….”

Also read: Ingmar Bergman’s World of Dreams

Bergman conceptualised and wrote Wild Strawberries while convalescing in a Stockholm hospital in the spring of 1957. His relations with his father, never quite smooth, were going through a particularly troubled phase just then. Bergman visualised the old professor’s estranged son as a surrogate for himself, while the distant and frosty professor was to stand in for his father.

But if things did not quite work out as planned, it was partly because Victor Sjostrom, who played the father/professor, brought his own ideas and his own sensibility to the role. Sjostrom, whose turn in Wild Strawberries was his last film assignment, had been one of Sweden’s great actor-directors of the silent era, whose work Bergman greatly admired ever since he had been a teenager. Indeed, Bergman has openly acknowledged his debt to two films from Sjostrom’s oeuvre – The Phantom Carriage and Karin Ingmarsdotter – and traces of these films’ influence are scattered across the memorable first dream sequence, in the driver-less funeral hearse, for example, or in the clock that has no hands. (The sense of decay and death that this eerie clock evokes returns powerfully in the sequence crafted around the professor’s 99-year old mother, on whom his son calls on his way to Lund. Slowly, for all her composure and glacial elegance, this woman emerges as hard and mean-spirited. And the antique clock in her collection is seen as having no hands.)

As the venerable professor, says Bergman, Sjostrom “took my text, made it his own, (and) invested it with his own experiences”, so that “Wild Strawberries was no longer my film, it was Victor Sjostrom’s!” Perhaps Sjostrom had intuitively divined Bergman’s painful identification with the father (in the film, the professor) from whom he had distanced himself. (Bergman talks about this unwitting identification himself somewhere: “I had created a character who, on the outside, looked like my father, but was me, through and through.”) Derek Malcolm was right in describing Sjostrom’s performance as transcendent.

The old man’s journey of self-discovery is livened up by three young hitchhikers ‒ two men and a girl ‒ whom the professor and his daughter-in-law agree to give a lift from midway. Sara reminds the professor of the girl (who bore the same name) he had once loved, but who had chosen to marry his brother instead.  To start with, his memories of her are bitter-sweet, but eventually, the bitterness makes way for forgiveness and acceptance, even as the magic of that first love returns to make his heart feel lighter.

Another middle-aged couple, whose car had broken down, prompting the professor to offer them a lift, bicker endlessly over this and that, putting the professor in mind of his own unhappy, broken marriage. As the couple begins to get on everyone’s nerves, the daughter-in-law demands that they leave the car. The unpleasant interlude haunts the old man: the husband returns in another nightmarish dream soon after to mock the professor over his supposed ignorance and ineptitude.

If the world of Wild Strawberries is not quite as sunny as that of the delightful Fanny and Alexander, Bergman’s last feature, it is also located very far from that of the truly dark films that he created in the early and mid-60s – Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence. Indeed, there are sequences in Wild Strawberries that are reminiscent of episodes from Fanny and Alexander: for example, the scenes from the family dinner table in the professor’s childhood; or the uncle who uses a weirdly funny contraption to help his poor hearing, or the twin sisters insisting on speaking together. The professor’s old housekeeper, who can tick him off when she thinks it necessary, also helps relieve the gloom in what otherwise is a rather joyless household presided over by a cold and grumpy old man. And finally, it is Wild Strawberries’ closing note of forgiveness and reconciliation, of acceptance and closure that stays with us. At his journey’s end, the professor’s life reclaims some of the meaning it had lost over years of weariness and impassivity. This touches a chord, because this impassivity and this weariness are a part of the burden that each one of us bears from day to day. 

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.