SINCE Ingmar Bergman is now considered a Swedish assembly line of masterpieces, it may seem sacrilegious to bracket his eighteenth wonder, Wild Strawberries, with Anatomy of a Murder (a tempo-less 160 minutes, involving Otto Preminger competence and one fine lawyering performance by George C. Scott), North by Northwest (the first hour is fun, despite senility catching up with Cary Grant’s charm technique), and The Devil’s Disciple (a trivial, syncopated Western, sparked by some of Bernard Shaw’s dialogue).
Each one of these films uses a precise, currently popular photography, in which details protrude with an icy, magic realist clarity that once ruined most surrealist painting. The fact that Bergman is always photographically in style doesn’t quite destroy his new film, which numbers among its assets a fine feeling for highway travel and an appealingly muted performance of old age by Victor Sjöström.
Like most of Bergman’s films, Wild Strawberries has a wild scenario built on the most indifferent event: a pleasant run through the countryside in an old, elegant boxlike car that resembles its owner, an eminent physician ( Sjöström) traveling to a university where he is to receive an important degree. In transit, the unemotional doctor talks to his daughter-in-law about her marital bust-up, picks up a trio of happy kid hitchhikers, has a close shave with a passing Volkswagen, and stops at lunchtime to visit his ancient mother. Most importunately, too, he moves in and out of dreams and daydreams that suggest the old man is “dead though alive,” and that his trip through life has been victimized by a cold heart.
In its less complicated moments, the film is one of the most natural car films on record, being kept free of both meatball melodrama (as happened in The Hitchhiker and Wages of Fear) and high-powered folksy humor (Gene Kelly’s The Happy Road, plus several films with the word “night” in the title). Though the travelers do an immense amount of cute, coy metaphysical and psychiatric talking, the journey is kept fluid by a wonderfully succinct, evocative treatment of car items and roadside effects. One shot of the physician’s chalky face against the darkly blotted car windows is almost worth the price of admission.
However, as the movie purrs along with a sure-handed grace, it becomes obvious that Bergman the Dream Merchant is often practicing stock riffs. Bergman shows the doctor caught in dreams that are a web of dated maneuvers from the scarier wing of museum art. In one dream that is fictionally rigged, as well as a potpourri of arty effects, the old man is seen attending his own funeral in an empty, shuttered street, where, among other rickety horrors, the doctor is almost dragged down into a casket by his own corpse.
The old man’s dreams of childhood are even more mired in fantastic landscaping that should be a finger exercise for any competent Swedish director. “As believable and profound as any ever filmed,” these tender reveries involve a small army of burstingly healthy blond kids having the giggles, pouts and tear jags around a landscape that Sweden’s film colony foolishly stole from an Auguste bore named Renoir.
One of the tiresome academy tricks (Renoir used it to death) consists in making triplicates of the children, matching the kids to the same prettily insipid physical mould. The scenes sparkle and silver in leafy arbors, then move to a perfectly still lake shore, and finally, in one tremendous snooze, do the famous Renoir bit at a heavily populated luncheon table where everything is a smash of vivacity, provincial bounce and domestic perfection. They are conceived with little more than esthetic shoe polish, are no more profound than the circus-candy charm that Joe Pasternak once created for Deanna Durbin.
Despite its blast of eclectic charm, Bergman’s film picks up excitement everywhere from a “demoniacally creative” style that hasn’t been on the film scene since the silent era. A fountain of tricks, the auto trip prospers from a parallelism that keeps the car interior populated with opposing tandems. The three hitchhikers are a mugging, chorus-boy irritation; however, they give the film some of its cold, surfacy jazz, and, for contrasting music, are rubbed against a jarringly neurotic husband and wife (whose Volkswagen turns over in one of the many piquant roadside images), forced to accompany the doctor as symbols of degradation.
As is the case with the three Hollywood films mentioned above, the descriptive “slick” seems like gross understatement in discussing Wild Strawberries. An eerie, felicitous opportunism steered this film—just enough Freudian bitters, modern marriage, supernatural overcast, and “smashingly beautiful” postcards to provide a full matinee of culture for the expanding middlebrow-highbrow audience. It probably is unnecessary to add that there’s a happy ending—with his reunited son and daughter-in-law watching over him and the hitchhikers serenading in the yard outside, the doctor slumbers off with a warm, pleasant, self-assured smile creasing his papier-mache face.
August 31, 1959