We are repeatedly told Isak is cold and unfeeling, but the warmth that emanates from behind Sjöström’s sad and crinkly eyes contradicts that narrative. There is a conundrum in Wild Strawberries Isak seeks forgiveness, but he seems rather a good egg than a terrible sinner. The sequence ends on another memory, this time of his wife, and a tryst that may or may not have occurred as depicted but which nevertheless reveals his ambivalence about the woman who fathered his son. After failing the exam, the experience morphs into a guilt dream the test is revealed as a trial. He looks into a microscope and can’t see anything, he sees only nonsense words scrawled on the chalkboard. (At least he remembered to wear pants). That turns into a common examination dream Isak has shown up for a test, but he’s not prepared.
It’s actually a series of dreams, beginning with another flashback to his youthful love. The second trip into Isak’s psyche takes place after we’ve been exposed to some flashbacks to his youth, and digs a bit deeper, although the symbolism is still fairly simple to grasp. Featuring a withered man with a squashed face and a hearse accident, it’s obviously Isak’s death-anxiety dream, an easy slam dunk interpretation for any amateur psychotherapist.
The initial nightmare comes in quickly, taking pride of place directly after the credits. The dreams depicted here err towards psychological realism rather than mystery. This is the kind of realism-based movie that conjures no magic for me, although I can appreciate the craftsmanship and understand why others with different predispositions rate it so highly. Many people deeply identify with Professor Isak’s pre-mortem ruminations, but I confess I’m not one of them. Wild Strawberries is an intimate, internalized movie about an ordinary man coping with regret at the end of his life, and, without a couple of dream sequences that Freud-obsessed Bergman couldn’t resist adding, it would belong to a tradition of quotidian dramatic cinema that stands directly opposed to the world of weird film. Only the presence of a couple of dream sequences, and the fact that the story emerges from the mind of semi-surrealist auteur Ingmar Bergman, make this character study worthy of a footnote in weird movie history.ĬOMMENTS: Incredibly, Ingmar Bergman released Wild Strawberries in the same year as The Seventh Seal, and although the overriding theme of both films is death, the approach taken in this quiet character study could hardly be different than the bombast of Seal‘s epic medieval fantasy. WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not weird enough. PLOT: An aging professor has dreams of death and flashbacks to his youth as he drives to a university to accept an honorary degree.
FEATURING: Victor Sjöström, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin
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