“My name is Isak Borg, and I am 78 years old.”
“Sometimes, and it isn’t always this way, it feels like we don’t see certain films until we’re supposed to see them. When the current lockdown situation began, the result of the early days of a global pandemic, I made a list and resolved to catch up with at least ten movies I felt embarrassed to admit I’d never seen. At the top of that list was Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). On the day that begins and ends the film, its central figure, Isak Borg, a respected inventor and physician, is about to take an afternoon’s drive on his way to receive an honorarium celebrating his long and distinguished career. On the day I first saw the film, about two months ago, my own father, who will turn 80 years old before I finish writing this piece, was admitted to the hospital with heart problems which cast his immediate future in doubt. Bergman’s great work is a brief consideration of a man late in life disturbed by restless nightmares of mortality who, in discerning ‘an extraordinary logic’ in contemplating various memory scenarios of his youth, and being forced to reconcile them with echoes of people and places in the present day, finds a modicum of relief from the haunting imposition and aggression of time.
“In Wild Strawberries, which is essentially Bergman’s contribution to the ‘road movie’ genre, Isak, played with world-weary elegance by the film director and actor Victor Sjostrom (who made silent films such as Lon Chaney’s He Who Gets Slapped), sets out with his intellectually imposing daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) for the university where he will be feted. The two have a testy relationship, but it is one gilded by mutual respect, which is perhaps more than either have for Marianne’s husband, Isak’s aloof, financially irresponsible son Evald (Gunnar Bjornstrand).
“Along the way, Isak stops at the house where he often summered as a boy with his family, and Bergman effortlessly glides into a series of remembrances, the aged Isak witnessing scenes from his youth in which the cousin he once loved, Sara (played by Bibi Andersson), confesses her feelings for the young Isak (who is never seen), all the while being pursued by his older brother. Sara is first recalled by Isak picking the wild strawberries of the film’s title, a gift for her uncle on his birthday, and a psychological touchstone that will go unmentioned elsewhere in the film, yet reverberate sweetly, nonetheless. Later he is awakened by another Sara (this one also portrayed by Andersson), a flighty young woman whose father now owns the property. She inquires about him (‘I lived here once, 200 years ago’) and then asks if she and her two boyfriends might tag along with Isak and Marianne for a ride into the city.
“Thus Bergman further introduces the film’s dramatic strategy of reflecting in his day’s journey key elements of Isak’s remembrances—youth as embodied by Marianne, Sara and her friends; memory, an insistent presence in the present- and past-days Saras, as well as in the testimonies to his stature as a local figure of regard from a gas station attendant (Max Von Sydow) they encounter along the way; the sour underbelly of marriage in the personage of a couple the travelers briefly assist after a car accident who cannot keep their contempt for each other at bay; and even Isak’s own feelings as a grown child bristling against the stern personality of his own mother, still alive, to whom he brings Marianne for a brief visit.
“There’s a grace in Bergman’s imagining of Isak’s past and present that is its own testimony to the great director’s own youthful dramatic empathy (Bergman was half Isak’s age when the film was made). Equally important to the film’s easy access to a viewer’s senses are its cadences-- unhurried, yet strangely urgent, as if time itself were in the back seat, persistent, yet just another rider on the road trip, always felt, never acknowledged except in the glistening, aged eyes, themselves caressed by great puffy pillows of knowing flesh around their edges, of the honorable, soon-to-be-honored driver.
“I thought of my father, a man nothing like the intellectually accomplished, professorial, grand yet unpretentious Isak, often while watching Wild Strawberries two months ago—it couldn’t be helped, I suppose. Yet in the film’s journey, and especially its conclusion, in which Isak realizes the value of the comfort he draws from the bittersweet memories of his own childhood—less nostalgic, and more revealing of his own flaws of his character as well as surges of unexpected strength—lent support to my own worries in imagining (hoping) my own father might also be nearing his own sort of similar reckoning. As Isak deals with ghosts, with past yearnings and shortcomings, and with a present fast approaching its inevitable conclusion, the peace Bergman crafts for him feels appropriate, well-earned, perfectly right. That peace is yet another form of grace, which in Wild Strawberries is in rich supply. ~ Dennis Cozzalio
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