Wild Strawberries (1960)

Wild Strawberries is a film from the renowned Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. It centers on a physician in his late 70's during a day-long travel to the city to receive his jubilee achievement award. This becomes an intimate and moving reflection of one man's life, and the events that brought him to the state of loneliness and lack of fulfillment that the doctor feels about his life.

Victor Sjostrom plays Dr. Isak Borg with such convincing sincerity that one can't help but pity the man who came to his present state of isolation from friends and family by his callous nature and egotism of his youth. Throughout his journey which he takes with his daughter-in-law he encounters a trio of young lovers who smoke, kiss, and discuss God, a quarreling married couple, and his estranged family. All of these people symbolize the different stages of his life, some of them his desires, others his regrets. Dr. Borg has a series of bizarre dreams and fantasies that bring him back to his youth and force him to think on his one true love that married his brother, the dissatisfaction that he feels in his work, and his ruminations about his death. All of these work as something of cleansing process that help him come to turns with his future and with his family.

It is a simple and delicate story that plays on our basic fear that we will grow old with nothing to look back on but sadness and opportunities not taken, and tells it in a way that is both poignant and hopeful, as is characteristic of the director. Bergman is a humanist, and knows how people think and interact with one another which really makes his characters come alive. That being said, I really have trouble becoming absorbed in his work, because his style is so clunky. Although the stories he chooses to tell are lovely there is no grace to his film making, and I find watching his films oddly jarring. I sometimes feel that his work might be best suited for the stage as he could then make his productions a work of actor and director which I think was what ultimately all he cared about.

3/4