Wild Strawberries

This is Bergman at his most tender, a beautiful and melancholic film using surrealistic dreams to depict the wallowing fear of death and the coldness of a hollow life. It is also his most humorous and light-hearted at times, due to the road trip part of the film in which he encounters an actress wife and her Catholic husband, a young woman and her flock of opposing philosophers. Professor Isak’s dreams are captured with a surrealistic sense, from the dream sequence in an empty town with the vestiges of death creeping in from all sides, to the sequence involving the crib of Sigfrid’s eldest son in a thunderstorm. Bergman frames many of the dream and memory sequences to show Isak looking within, whether it is staring bluely through a window or peering through a door frame. This sort of framing endows these memories and dreams with a melancholic and unapproachable distance, as if to emphasize this near-voyeuristic view of nostalgia or to cause the viewer to ruminate. Bergman also blurs the lines between life and death through his dream sequences. The dream scene where he is judged on his competence and his character remind me of a judgement after death. Yet, it also prosecutes his coldness by showing the hollowness of his soul, by subverting his loving wife as an adulterer who echoes those same sentiments. Perhaps the pocket watch with no hands, given to him by his mother, suggest that his fear of mortality has turned him into an empty husk. The time to death is not ticking, it has already manifested itself in his living reality. The final sequence where we see Isak’s mother and father enjoying the idyllic nature is the encapsulation of comforting nostalgia, of the fondness of lifetime memories.