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Wild Strawberries (Svensk Filmindus-tri; Janus). The important Bergman, so far as the world's art-film buffs are concerned, is not Ingrid but Ingmar. No kin to his sister Swede, 41-year-old Ingmar Bergman is one of the most peculiarly gifted and demoniacally creative moviemakers of modern times—"a gothic Dante," one European critic called him. Son of a famed Stockholm clergyman, Bachelor Bergman works all winter as a director and producer in Sweden's legitimate theater. In spring he retreats to a sanatorium, where he furiously composes scenarios. In summer he makes weirdly beautiful movies—he is now working on his 21st — that have won him a bagful of major film prizes and made him a coffeehouse celebrity from Stockholm to San Francisco.
Wild Strawberries is Director Bergman's 18th film, and it has been widely acclaimed as his masterpiece—it won the Grand Prize at Berlin's Film Festival last year. It describes a day in the life of a very old, very eminent Swedish physician (Victor Sjostrom). It is the day on which he is to receive an important degree from his university, the crown of his life and work. Strangely, this happy day begins with a horrible dream: he is attending his own funeral, and his own corpse is trying to drag him down into his grave. He recapitulates his life's journey in a series of dreams and daydreams that reveal to him the meaning and unmeaning of his existence. He sees that he is indeed "dead though alive," a whited sepulcher, because his heart is cold. In the end, by living his spiritual death as a felt reality, he experiences his resurrection as a human being.
Like most of Bergman's pictures, Wild Strawberries is smashingly beautiful to see. He works in chiaroscuro—the light expresses the innocence of the doctor's youth, the dark describes the moral gloom of his old age. More important, Bergman employs the language of dream and symbol with an eerie, sleep-talking sureness; some of the old man's dreams are as believable and profound as any ever filmed.
The trouble, on the whole, is that Bergman has a far stronger affinity for the eternal symbol than he does for the living moment, more feeling for ideas than for people. He makes his pictures more as a philosopher conducts an argument than as an artist tells a story. And when he cannot make his ideas clear in action or vision, he does not hesitate to interrupt the flow of the film and say what he means in words, words, words. Bergman's problem seems to be the same as his pro tagonist's as an artist he lives too much in his mind, too little in his feelings; he has hot ideas and a cold heart.
For all its involutions and pedantries, the film has a strong popular appeal, partly because of its theme—the discovery of the heart—but mostly because of Actor Sjostrom (well known to U.S. audiences of the '205 as Director Victor Sea strom, who made such Hollywood successes as The Scarlet Letter and He Who Gets Slapped), who gives a magnificent performance as the doctor. He is Life itself, the unraised Lazarus, the failed Faust.