Released in 1982, ‘Fanny and Alexander‘ was created in two formats, as some of the other later work of Ingmar Bergman – as a TV series and as a big screen feature film. I have seen this later version yesterday at our local cinematheque and I was simply overwhelmed. It is one of those creations that make us love film as an art and we go to the cinema for. A story on screen that is at the same time complex and told in very simple and clear ways, a world where reality and imagination, history and ghosts live together. A masterpiece.
The time and the landscape are the ones we are familiar with from the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg – Scandinavia at the crossroads of the 19th and 20th century. A frozen land and a social landscape in which strict moral and social rules conflict with the liberal thinking and the progress which comes with its own risks, were passions and innocence are often crushed under the family and social pressure. The Eckdahls – a rich widowed mother and her three sons – are bourgeois and liberal. We never learn how the wealth is accumulated, but it is enough to allow for the Christmas 1907 party described in the formidable opening scene look somehow like the ball scene in the Luchino Visconti‘s The Leopard. The fate and the success of the three sons are mixed. One of them is in debt, the other is more interested by the young au pair of his kids than by his allowing wife, and the third owns a theater and is married to a beautiful actress. When the last suddenly dies (on stage, playing the ghost father in Hamlet) and his wife decides to re-marry the local bishop his two children (Alexander and Fanny) will risk to become victims of a Dickensian fate.
A whole world is created and exposed under our eyes. Houses become labyrinths were we wander and get lost together with the characters and the film cameras. Images of nature outside pace the time and seasons. The family fights for economic and social survival and for the defense of a way of life that conflicts with the rigid and hypocritical morality imposed by the bishop. Characters never leave this world even after their death, the ghosts in Bergman’s film materialize, watch, touch and threaten. Theater, the other passion of Bergman, occupies an important role in the life of the heroes. The best friend of the family and the character that plays a key role in the most important moment of the story is an old Jew, an antiquarian and a puppeteer. Quite interesting to see this character of a Jew, constructed to represent an exotic counterpoint of the established rules of the society, not without some social comments about prejudice about Jews in the Scandinavian world. At some point in the action God himself is mistaken for a puppet. By the end, somehow, life seems to come back to its previous patterns, and the two children who are the intermediates by which the story is told return to the comfort of their previous lives. Danger however waits in the future. The solution of the story gave birth to new ghosts.
It’s quite difficult to analyze the tools of the master. I can do it, of course, but no words can do good service to what we see on screen. This film must be seen and lived.