Friday, January 28, 2011

Winter Light

Fanny and Alexander - The Television Version (1982)
directed by Ingmar Bergman
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The Bluths of Orange County are a lot like the Ekdahls of Sweden, with failings large and small. One needs to see the worst of them - brother Carl berating his wife for the better part of one of the film's five acts, or the family's decision to let Emilie leave at all - to make the funny moments shine. Otherwise the negotiations between the surviving Ekdahl sons and Edvard Vergerus would be nothing but a demonstration of dramatic anger, instead of the give and take that adjusts, once again, our compassion for Carl and even sympathy for the Bishop.

Best of all, it is a great movie about kids. The title itself, as others have pointed out, says much about Bergman's attention to them and to details. Fanny, who appears in most scenes beside her brother, says almost nothing in the space of five hours. But she is the reason, even more than her mother, that Alexander rebels in the ways he does, and fights back when he would otherwise admit defeat, and wins, in the end, his fractured freedom. She is there for him, and he for her. Even the ghosts that drift and moan in Alexander's ear have imperatives beside their own misery: in the case of the dead sisters, a game with the boy that replaced them, or for Oscar Ekdahl, the unexpected wish of his son to please get along to heaven and leave him alone.

The magic that Alexander takes for granted and fears remains a mystery, even with time between episodes to talk it over, and Bergman explains his horrors only by piling more daring feats of sorcery atop minor tricks of the eye. He devotes entire rooms, and then houses, to the occult and the dead, who achieve their odd ends in odd ways; there is more loneliness in that mummy's turn of the skull than even Imhotep achieved, but power, too. As a movie about winter, Fanny and Alexander does two things. One, it gives us ghosts, and restores the heightened senses of October nights to the first cold and feeble months of the new year. Two, it ends in summer, with daylight, and ushers us through gray days into green.