0 Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Fanny och Alexander, Sweden/France/West Germany, 312 minutes
Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Sven Nykvist
Music: Daniel Bell
Editor: Sylvia Ingemarsson
Cast: Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Gunn Wallgren, Allan Edwall, Jarl Kulle, Borje Ahlstedt, Ewa Froling, Christina Schollin, Mona Malm, Jan Malmsjo, Erland Josephson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Kerstin Tidelius, Emelie Werko, Marianne Aminoff, Lena Olin, Pernilla August, Harriet Andersson

Ingmar Bergman's announced final film—he would actually make many more movies for Swedish television, including Saraband in 2003—is a colossal formal banquet of a movie, with many courses and a fine table. The long version (the one to see) rambles at its ease between the church, streets, theater, and homes of Uppsala, a small but growing Swedish city in 1907. Across winter and summer holidays, Bergman's deeply complex stories and film penetrate the tormented and banal lives it observes easily and naturally. Riffing on the profile of a bourgeois extended northern European family, much in the vein of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks for an earlier era, it is plainly the work of a master, a clinic in how to turn many sharply observed small elements into a fine movie.

Interestingly, it's not even the first time Bergman released a very good long picture theatrically, with a far superior and even longer version in the wings just behind it (in the U.S., at any rate). The first was Scenes From a Marriage, from 1973, which I think is even better than Fanny and Alexander. But Fanny and Alexander is the one that gets pride of place in surveys such as the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, where it presently sits at #57 (compared with #360 for Scenes). I suspect this is because Fanny and Alexander is more overtly and even self-consciously literary in its ambitions, applying itself equally to sumptuous Christmas celebrations, familiar rotting church-inflected corruptions of the soul, and plain old ghost stories, Henry James style. Potential spoilers ahead.


Over the years, it's the Christmas celebration that's tended to stick with me most indelibly about Fanny and Alexander, remembering set pieces such as when the extended family and servants clasp hands and snake in a line through the house as they sing—joy rendered perfectly, a scene I love. The first section, "The Ekdahl Family Celebrates Christmas" by name, runs longer than 90 minutes, the longest of the five by far (I'm not sure of the specific times for the shorter, 188-minute theatrical release, but my sense from recent viewings is that proportions are basically the same).

This first section introduces the principals, catching up with them on Christmas Eve and staying with them for their elaborate feast and rituals and celebration through the night all the way to Christmas morning (among other things, this is also one of the great foodie movies of all time, with multiple eating occasions). It overflows with comforting images of middle-class Christmas customs, obviously somewhat antiquated, but still familiar, resonant, and evocative: trimmed trees, wrapped packages piled under them, a church Christmas pageant, strange and hilarious food and dining traditions. It is effectively, and amazingly, charged with love.

The Ekdahl clan, with servants, is huge, consisting at its core of Helena Ekdahl (Gunn Wallgren), the doting matriarch, with her three sons—Oscar (Allan Edwall, a beautifully expressive face), Gustav Adolf (Jarl Kulle), and Carl (Borje Ahlstedt)—and their wives and various children, two of which, by Oscar and Emilie (Ewa Froling), are the 8-year-old Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and 10-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve) of the title.

While Fanny and Alexander are central to everything that happens, and usually quietly right in the middle of it, they are more like the still center of a storm, behaving largely as I think most children would, in both the ordinary and extraordinary circumstances they encounter. This helps ground the story, setting the startling forays into fantasy in sharper relief. Part of the genius of the screenplay, also by Bergman, is that it effectively makes no one or two or three characters the focus but rather ingeniously contrives to make the larger family itself, in all its thrumming, writhing collisions of individual personalities and failings, the central character.

In fact, because there are so many, with such rich backgrounds and stories, it still feels almost just a little underdeveloped, which is a remarkable feat for a movie that runs more than five hours. One reason I prefer the long version, for example, is because the story of the brother Carl, a failing alcoholic academic, and his German wife Lydia (Christina Schollin) and their pitiful shambles of a marriage, opens up the dimensions of the family remarkably with the addition of a few more skillfully rendered scenes. In the theatrical version I think Carl's spectacular farting is all that's most memorable about him. But there is much more to him. I also noticed the last time I looked, as another example, that we learn very little about the children of Gustav Adolf and his wife Alma (Mona Malm), the latter yet one more brilliant performance and character in a picture studded with them.

This is all aided in no small part by two hugely important elements: a dazzling cast and cinematographer Sven Nykvist. If I were going to point to the star attractions in this smorgasbord I would start with Ewa Froling, Gunn Wallgren, and another character and performance I haven't mentioned yet, Bishop Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjo). (There's also a typically excellent performance from Erland Josephson as Isak Jacobi, "the Jew," but I don't want to get sidetracked here.) The showdowns between and various turns by Froling and Malmsjo tend to be the points in this epic where the tension is most ratcheted and the narrative perfectly riveting. I'm one who tires quickly of Bergman's too-frequent resort to childhood and/or sexual abuse as plot device across the body of his work, but here it is handled very well indeed. Froling and Malmsjo utterly occupy their doomed roles.

Wallgren, on the other hand, as the soft-hearted matriarch Helena, brings a warm and human touch, a kind of emotional guide-star. She gets weepy and sentimental on Christmas Eve. "The happy, splendid life is over, and the horrible, dirty life engulfs us," she says through her sobs. Then a few minutes later she cheers up again, smiling at the thought of someone. At one point she says she loved her career as an actress, but secretly preferred being a mother. The expression on her face in a quick cut in the devastating funeral march tells us everything we need to know and feel about the death of Oscar. Wallgren's performance is one that just seems to get better and better.

The whole thing does. As with another big-movie favorite of mine, Nashville (though very different), I get the feeling that Fanny and Alexander could be twice its present size, 10 hours, or even twice that, and it would still be fascinating, every minute.

Top 10 of 1982
I reckon 1982 among the better single years in a decade that seems to me now a lot more lackluster than it did as I was living through it. No accounting for taste, maybe. At any rate, the top 10 is certainly solid, though it tends to taper off some after #8. Indeed, I feel so good about everything from the year otherwise that three of the movies in the "didn't like so much" list I actually do like (talking about Diner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and The Year of Living Dangerously). It's just that everything else made a little better impression. They may well have underwhelmed me because others have been so outspokenly partisan about them. Go figger, as a friend is wont to put it. Another day in the life of the contrarian. Also, I really should see Eating Raoul again. That means there's only one stinker I'm sure about.
1. Fanny and Alexander
2. The King of Comedy
3. Blade Runner
4. Poltergeist
5. Burden of Dreams
6. Veronika Voss
7. Tootsie
8. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
9. Liquid Sky
10. Quest for Fire

Didn't like so much: Diner, Eating Raoul, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, The Year of Living Dangerously

Gaps: The Draughtsman's Contract, Missing, On Top of the Whales, The State of Things, The Verdict

Detail: Fanny and Alexander (1982)

0 Scenes From a Marriage (1973)

#2: Scenes From a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)

In many ways I grew up with this movie; on an emotional level, I mean that literally. Properly speaking, it's more of a television mini-series—and something of an event at that when it ran on Swedish television in the spring of 1973. Stories are that the entire country stopped to watch each weekly episode (one per week on the same day and time is still a good way to look at it). The first version that I saw in the mid-'70s was the chopped-down cut made for a U.S. theatrical release, which reduced it from its six-part 300 minutes to a still-long 167 minutes and also dubbed all the dialogue into English. I was 19 or 20, and mostly just bored.

But some 15 years later, working my way through the thickets of a divorce, I saw that same version again on a VHS tape from the library and it all but did me in then and there. I have since seen the theatrical version without the dubbing, and eventually, when Criterion did it right as they do so much right, the entire mini-series, which of course I would now recommend without hesitation as the version to see. But I can say from experience that even the bowdlerized, dubbed version is worth a look, and I wouldn't hesitate if it was my only option.


I'm hard put to think of any other film that has two matched performances of this caliber. Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann are towering, masterful, amazing, unforgettable—somebody stop me before I get my hands on a thesaurus. It's just not possible to overstate how good they both are here. It's a clinic in film acting, made even more impressive by the fact that, with a few exceptions here and there, they bear all the screen time for the entire five hours.

I admire Ingmar Bergman a lot, but must say I often find many of his older films now almost so dated as to verge on trite. The dream sequences, the fanciful chess matches with death, even the bleak Nordic landscapes—I'll allow that my fatigue on these scores might only be some indication of his massive influence. At the same time, his projects from the second half of his career too often seem to me to indulge a taste for the bizarrely grotesque, almost to the point where it feels pro forma. (A good example is the quasi-sequel to this that he made in 2003, Saraband, which works in an incest theme that elucidates very little else.) Scenes From a Marriage is among the places where I think he got everything just right (along with, to only slightly lesser degrees, Persona and Fanny and Alexander).

There's not much available on YouTube that's particularly amenable to English-speaking monoglots such as myself. The clip at the link, with Swedish dialogue and subtitles in a language I don't recognize, will have to do. It's in a universal language anyway that I think nearly everyone who has been married, and certainly everyone who has been divorced, will quickly recognize. I hasten to note that not all of these "scenes from a marriage" are like this—virtually the whole range of experience seems to me to be contained in it, and effectively so, from joy to sadness to complacency to intimacy to boredom, petty competitiveness, genuine kindness, and more. That range is exactly what makes it so great.

"Aklindaki nedir biliyorum."

Phil #2: Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) (scroll down)
Steven #2: The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969)

Not sure why, because Steven had mentioned early that his #2 was a documentary, but I was still surprised to find The Sorrow and the Pity here and so high. Similarly, I knew Rosemary's Baby was a favorite of Phil's, but somehow didn't expect it to go all the way to #2. My pick here actually turned out to be the only Bergman among all three lists, with no Kurosawas for any of us, which came as more surprises for me. You start out these countdowns thinking you have all the time in the world for everything, but then you get down to the last few and opportunities seem to dry up fast.

Detail: Scenes From a Marriage (1973)