Wild Strawberries

The brilliance of Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) stems from the acting by Victor Sjöström, Ingrid Thulin, and Bibi Andersson, the use of memory and dreams as a way of exposing and unraveling Dr. Isak Borg's life, the various characters who pass in and out of the film, the use of landscape, and (of course), the directing. When Bergman died, several articles called Wild Strawberries his greatest film. I had never seen it all the way through, so I put it on my list. When I finally began to watch it, I did so with trepidation--dread of watching a long and tedious exercise in self-reflection and ponderous symbolism. Wild Strawberries was neither tedious nor ponderous.

As an old man playing an old man (no artificial makeup), Sjöström merely plays himself, or a version of himself, Dr. Borg, a retired medical doctor and professor, on the day that he is traveling to receive an honorary doctorate at a national university. His wife is long dead, and his son lives in another part of the country. His only companion is his housekeeper. His decision to drive to the university upsets her. She was looking forward to accompanying him to the ceremony on an airplane. She has served him for many years, and they sometimes interact as if they are husband and wife, though neither would agree to the label, and at the end of the film when the professor asks her to call him by his first name, she refuses, saying that she is content with the current nature of their relationship.

Through a series of dreams and memories, Borg revisits past events of his life: his idyllic childhood with his family, his love for a young woman who ended up marrying someone else, his less than happy marriage to another woman. The dream sequences are full of symbolic images and psychological portents. In the first one, he wanders the streets of a city that seems familiar to him, but it is deserted, and when he does manage to find someone, the person has no face-- only a blank visage. Is this Borg's own face, devoid of the details and accomplishments of his own life?

Along the way to the university Borg visits the family summer vacation home of his youth. Here the wild strawberries that he used to pick with the woman he loved become the symbol of lost youth and precious memories. During the drive he talks with his daughter-in-law Sara, who has been visiting with him. During their talk she reveals that she does not like him, that she finds him self-absorbed, egotistical, and cold. He receives this revelation in a matter-of-fact way, as if it is not a surprise, though it clearly is a surprise. The tenor of many of the revelations of the day drive home the fact that he has led a cold and self-absorbed life that has left him with few if any friends, an embittered son (Sara tells the professor that his son hates him).

The portrait is not entirely bleak. When Borg visits the town where he lived as a young man, residents come up to him to pay respects and express gratitude for all his service. He has worked for many years as a doctor, and his inventions and research have been of great use to the country. So while he has led a career as a venerated doctor and professor, his inner, private life has been cold.

In the course of the drive, Borg gives a ride to a group of traveling college students (two of them have a fist-fight over the question of God's existence) and a quarreling husband and wife. These temporary passengers are a source of comedy in the film, but they also help advance Borg's progressing assessment of his life. The husband and wife quarrel so fiercely that Borg finally puts them out of the car. He says he did so for the same of the college students, whom he does not want to expose to such bitterness, but it becomes clear that they remind him of his own unhappy marriage. The college students are silly and carefree, full of enthusiasm. They admire Borg and before they leave him sing to him from below his window. They remind Borg of his brothers and sisters, of that time in his early life of hope and possibility.

As Sara and Izak talk, her attitude towards him softens. She reveals her estrangement from her husband, who in ways is cold and distant like his father. She wants to have a child, and he does not.

This film is about how Izak Borg comes to terms with this life. He looks back over all that he has done and said, all the people he has known, and comes to an essential point of loneliness. Even his housekeeper declines to be his friend. She is content to be his servant--nothing more. (Borg's unawareness of how she really feels about him is evidence, perhaps, of his self-absorption). Yet in the reconciliation of his son and his wife, and in his deep and precious memories of his life with his parents and his brothers and sisters, he finds solace and redemption. Memory is redemption, in this film.