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For all its length (over three hours), Fanny and Alexander is a curiously thin film from Ingmar Bergman, the brooding Swede who made such remarkable works as Sawdust and Tinsel(1953), The Seventh Seal (1956), Winter Light (1963) and, above all, The Silence (1963). A narrative-bound piece despite its last-act foray into colorful fancy and mysticism, Fanny and Alexander places Bergman, who wrote and directed, dispiritingly past his prime. For the most part the piece is moribund and simplistic, not to mention cold; but this last quality is nothing new to Bergman. I like the film more than I probably should for its theatrical shimmers by way of Strindberg, whose magnificent A Dream Play is being read by one of the characters, and which Bergman himself directed on stage; but Fanny and Alexander strikes me as the “easiest” Bergman experience one can hope for. It’s a film for those who wish to say “I tried Bergman” but who also wish to remain safe from the emotional and intellectual challenges his better films require. That said, it’s a good film, not a bad one, and possibly even a great one. It’s just not great Bergman.*
I am not going to get into the story, of which there is simply too much, except to call this a family chronicle of two young children, a brother and sister, who lose their father to death (from a stroke) and their mother to their stepfather, a strict Lutheran bishop. The film is autobiographical but symbolically rather than literally so (the stepfather is primarily based on Bergman’s clergyman-father whose dogmatic Christian beliefs and virulent anti-Semitism divided the two); indeed, the film presents something of a dream world, one in which a Jew, assisted by magic, rescues the children from their new, inhospitable home and hides them away in his pawnshop. (He is their Grandma’s long-ago lover.) Especially for Alexander, this signals their renewing immersion in the kind of inspiring love of art and imagination that the children’s father had instilled in them. The film thus comes full circle, but “outside” the Christian life that Bergman, an atheist, considers anything but life-affirming. Bergman’s religion, the object of his faith, is art: in particular, classical music, expressionistic theater, and of course cinema.
The first part of the film is an evocation of a nurturing, protective childhood. Christmastime is sumptuous for the Ekdahls, an immense, well-off family, courtesy of Grandpa and Grandma, with theatrical roots, near the turn of the century in a provincial town, and the Magic Lantern, with its moving images, entertains the children as a progenitor of cinema. The second, Dickensian part in the children’s new home—Bishop Edvard Vergerus’s home—is of far more interest, however. The spare, severe style that the biological father’s funeral had introduced signals a shift in the nature of the mise-en-scène; the bishop’s unadorned domain into which the children have not been permitted to bring anything of their former life, by recalling this funeral, visually enforces upon the children the loss that has determined their reduced circumstance. Like many actual children in the same circumstance, Fanny and Alexander are unfair to their stepparent, even viciously so, but there’s no way to gauge by the film the extent to which Bergman himself is capable of objectively taking this in. Supported by his rebellion against the far less privileged and indulgent nature of this new circumstance of his, Alexander in particular discharges his monumental pain in monumentally nasty fashion. In response, the bishop, who clearly knows next to nothing about sympathetic child-rearing, reacts with authoritarian resolve that Bergman may identify with his father. There is one small piece of evidence outside the film, however, that Bergman wasn’t totally nonobjective, that he isn’t completely, unreasonably siding with the obnoxious, noxious Alexander. Edvard has occasion to whip his offensive stepson. (Make no mistake that Alexander invites the punishment, which in no way, of course, means that Edvard shouldn’t have mustered the fortitude not to administer it. But Alexander taunts Edvard with his loss of first wife and children, suggesting that Edvard himself was responsible for their deaths.) To some viewers, the whipping seems extreme. In the published version of the script, Bergman describes the punishment as mild. Perhaps the difference may be explained by an understanding on Bergman’s part that Edvard, however rigid, is cruelly victimized by Alexander, which is certainly the case. Something actually in the film bears this out; when Alexander and Fanny are taken away (by the antique dealer) from Bishop Vergerus and his world, the bishop’s cry (“My babies!”—an echo of the past?) is heartrending. This is perhaps the most human(e) note struck throughout. (As the bishop, Jan Malmsjö gives the film’s most complex and moving performance.) Nevertheless, a measure of how hopelessly ambivalent and emotionally sloppy the film is, it’s quite possible to adopt the children’s point of view and (absent all evidence) accept that Edvard is, as Alexander believes and broadcasts for his own selfish reasons, a killer. It’s also possible that Bergman doesn’t realize how damagingly unresolved he has left his material; which is to say, he may have confused his own tortured ambivalence with the kind of genuine ambiguity that certain artists—for instance, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol—pursue with thematic and stylistic purpose. A mix-up in Bergman’s head isn’t about to yield any truths about the ambiguous nature of reality. On the contrary, Bergman invites the acceptance of Edvard’s outcome—he is suddenly burned to death, and in an especially cruel instant we see his charred body moving—as something magical and inexplicably delightful: providential, one would say, but in a Godless, because random universe. (This end to Edvard is Alexander’s wish, actuated by another, somewhat otherworldly child, Ishmael.) One can argue, as some have done, that Alexander’s subjectivity provides the perceptual vantage that unifies the film’s rangy material, but one is waiting for Godot, apparently, for Bergman to assert some clarifying viewpoint that creates a unifying vision separate from his unwholesome and malodorous identification with a child who (self-defensively?) he fails to notice is a spoiled brat.
In the film’s final act, Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson, with whom Bergman had been working, in theater, since the 1930s) takes center stage. Like many sympathetic Gentiles, Bergman is utterly fascinated by Jews; a Jew had been a major character in his first English-language film, The Touch (1971). (Elliott Gould played the part.) In some ways the antique dealer’s domain, which Fanny and Alexander become part of, represents a point of mediation between the Ekdahls’ world and the bishop’s, one world of theatrical insulation and magic, and of sensual riches (such as delicious food), and another world infused with spiritual commitment. But with its spilling-over bounty of antiques and puppets and rich colors and magic, it’s more likely to seem to bypass the bishop’s world entirely in order to bring a world of expressionistic, magical theater to sparkling, abundant life. It’s a mystical place, to be sure, and it represents, I suppose, a childhood translation of theatrical experience. Too bad that the claims of artistic unity require that this world be an extension of Alexander’s spoiled, self-indulgent nature—a nature, it seems, that Bergman holds onto as though it were a security blanket. Behind Fanny and Alexander, there is Bergman, in his mid-sixties, with a thumb in his mouth and an index finger up his nose.
Ever ambivalent, Bergman must also penitently march himself into a corner, for poor Alexander ends up haunted by his stepfather’s ghost. Since earlier he witnessed his own father’s ghost, the good and bad fathers, once separate, may have unhappily merged. There is a fairy tale quality to the film that I like, but sometimes, as with these paternal ghosts, it crops up in ugly ways. Another example is an unhappy character’s continually scratching the palm of her hand into a stigma. (Perversely, Bergman casts a former mistress, Harriet Andersson, in this unpleasant role.) Doubtless, Bergman feels he is really “sticking it” to Christianity by exposing its pathological, masochistic side; but the comment is lost amidst his own cruelties.
All sorts of people, though, love this film, which comes decked out with prizes. Fanny and Alexander won as best foreign-language film the César, the David di Donatello Award, the Oscar, and the British Academy Award. Bergman’s direction similarly won numerous prizes worldwide, as did Sven Nykvist’s color cinematography.
* I began this piece on Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 Fanny and Alexander thusly: “For all its length (over three hours), Fanny and Alexander is a curiously thin film from Ingmar Bergman . . . . A narrative-bound piece despite its last-act foray into colorful fancy and mysticism, Fanny and Alexander places Bergman, who wrote and directed, dispiritingly past his prime. For the most part the piece is moribund and simplistic, not to mention cold; but this last quality is nothing new to Bergman. I like the film more than I probably should for its theatrical shimmers by way of Strindberg, whose magnificent A Dream Play is being read by one of the characters, and which Bergman himself directed on stage; but Fanny and Alexander strikes me as the ‘easiest’ Bergman experience one can hope for. It’s a film for those who wish to say ‘I tried Bergman’ but who also wish to remain safe from the emotional and intellectual challenges his better films require. That said, it’s a good film, not a bad one, and possibly even a great one. It’s just not great Bergman.”
But I based my displeasure on what I had actually seen: the 188-minute film that was available in the U.S. I had not seen the original Swedish version, which runs 312 minutes. I have now viewed Fanny and Alexander in all its length and all its glory. It is a much richer and more complex work than the shortened version suggests.
It was Bergman himself who trimmed the original television version for theatrical release. He did so reluctantly: “I had to cut into the nerves and the lifeblood of the film.” The complete version, critic Stig Björkman has accurately written, “is, without a doubt, Bergman’s most richly orchestrated work.” It is also profound. Novelist Rick Moody has written the following: “[I]n the twenty-first century” [Fanny and Alexander] looks like what it was meant to be, a big, omnivorous bildungsroman about youthful imagination at the moment of modernism’s inception.”
It is a film that deserves to be seen—but only in its complete version.
I make no apologies for my earlier review. Based on the shortened version of the film, honestly I could have written nothing else.
