Surprised by Joy?

Wild Strawberries Ingmar Bergman (1957)

A film of dreams and memories, impending death and ugly truth, Wild Strawberries could easily have been another depressing, ponderous and miserable ninety minutes of heavy viewing. Certainly the very beginning of the film points in that direction: Professor Isak Borg is a curmudgeonly old man who declares at the very outset that he has cut himself off from all human contact because, as he puts it, relations with other people largely comprise “discussions about their character and behaviour”. 

Bergman wastes no time; this dose of misanthropy in the opening seconds is quickly followed by some casual misogyny – just for balance, I suppose: the Professor tells his long-suffering daughter in law that women should be banned from smoking and that their only permitted vices should be weeping, giving birth and gossiping about the neighbours.

Well on the way to misery, so. However, this film actually ends up being anything but miserable. The professor is forced to look at his life, to look at his intolerances, to face his shortcomings and his failures. The still from the movie above shows the old Professor facing his reflection in a mirror held in the hand of his one-time lover, Sara. This is the core of the movie - the professor learns how to live what little life he has left by learning from his past. Through flashbacks, dreams and meetings we learn that he was an over-serious, joyless youth; that he has had a failed marriage to an unfaithful wife; that his mother, still alive at the age of 96, lives and has lived on little more than bitterness and cynicism.

This is a joyful film but the joy is understated and very hard won. The external plot of the movie – a road trip from Stockholm to the town of Lund where he is to be present with an honorary degree at his university – mirrors the professor’s internal journey to his final acceptance of the importance and value of other people; men, women, his only child and, indeed himself.

Wild Strawberries is a surprising film. I had expected a horror show (it is Bergman!) and indeed the shadowy photography, macabre dream montages and the atmospheric score all work to present moments of tense gothic.  

Perhaps it is too positive to be anything more than a cul-de sac? No, I don’t think so because it avoids sentimentality, it does not disguise the decrepitude of old age and the proximity of the protagonist’s death reminds me that character reconstruction in the shadow of the grave, while welcome,  is work that should be done much earlier in life.

We spend a lot of time gazing into the mirror of the past in Ireland. I doubt much is learned though - I mean self-congratulatory guff about how the failings of the past are now over - the killing in the north, the abuse of women and children, the decades - long theocratic suffocation of thought, feeling, and action that followed 'independence', the venality of the ruling class, the tweedledum and tweedledee of centre-right versus centre-right post civil war politics, the socialist bale out of the banking sector at my expense - is just that - guff. I don't want to hear any more of that. Export.