Fanny & Alexander

You could call this my opinion of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander...as opposed to a review. I really don't feel the need in describing or summarizing this film. Any review, as I see it, would be pointless. Words just can't convey what makes a truly great movie as good as it is. The best "review" I could give Fanny and Alexander is to just see the damned thing. If you can't sit through it, so be it. But, those who are willing to give it their attention, I promise, will be rewarded continuously through the film's duration. Anyone who sits through the entire film, especially the full-length version, I think, will find it difficult to say that they were bored. More than likely, they will find it easy to say, "That was a damned good movie." I, myself, was surprised. Previous to seeing F&A, I had never seen a film quite this long. I'm glad I did. I'll also throw this in: most film buffs, I think it's safe to say, will always consider Bergman to be the master of gloom. This may be true, but I think Fanny and Alexander proves beyond any doubt that his ability to express the joy that exists in life is every bit as great, and truly refreshing.

This film could never have been made in the United States. I realize when it was made Bergman had been around for a long time and had his own clout but it still has too much of a philosophical slant to be mainstream here. This film is amazing. The first hour moves at a slow pace but it really sets up the rest of the movie well and then it really picks up. The cinematography is breathtaking and while this story makes you think a lot you don't feel ambivalent towards the characters through the rest of the first film after having been slowly introduced to all the characters you have a certain identifcation that is purely emotional and blends wonderfully with the other aspects of the film. It's truly great and should be considered one of Bergman's best works.

It's the disclosure of disfunction to children's eyes, the discovery of a world not conceived, or indeed anticipated, a contract broken, of barriers erected and bolstered, mistrust, disbelief and, perhaps more importantly, the formation and flowering of the unique specimen you are likely to become as a result. Film making is not just an exploration of its characters and creators but, more usually, an exploration of you! and how you scale against its mirrors and answer its questions? Why else would you invest so much time into discovering your difference and why you're so resistant to change?

Perhaps the most impressive feature of this wonderful film is the humility with which its creator presents it to the world, as if it were no grander than the old-fashioned Nativity-play shown in the early scenes at the Theatre.

At the end of this experience - to term it with any mere technical tag, like 'movie', would be inadequate - Bergman's profoundly grown-up disillusionment has transformed into the pure spirituality of abnegation and acceptance. His intellectual pilgrimage, through possibly the greatest career in films, finds the director arriving back where he began, with the great simplicities of life. But there is a difference with his return, which is that his prodigality over the years has burnt the rage out of him, and finally allowed him to 'enjoy what may be enjoyed' (as one of the Ekdahls says), without further fretting over the puzzle of human existence. From all this human folly (he clearly feels) comes the only wisdom, which is - simply - to be human.

It is, indeed, a film like no other for allowing the pieces of experience to settle into their appointed places. There is a beautiful quality of selfless resignation, in this last of his works for cinema, which finally and forever excels the sadistic disciplines of The Bishop.

This perverted creature confesses, to the new wife whom he has lost, how it is impossible to 'tear off the mask' as it is 'burned into my face': He is become an authoritarian '... a rite, a law, a custom - not a man'. [Shelley] Having put the notional love of God before that of humankind, there is nowhere for his personality to be re-enacted in the bosom of any kindly recollections that will survive him. Except in that of Alexander/Bergman, where his two, each-in-their-own-way terrifying, fathers, both the White and the Black opposites of an imagination flickering with the director's haunted vision, will project forever onto his Cinematic arena of stark absolutes the inner strife where each of us is locked away, struggling to endure the turmoil of these eternally irreconcilable truths.

The White Knight and The Black Bishop: These are phantom moves in our great game with Death, and pieces that will be returned into play for as long as humanity continues. How like Chess Life is: Just a game we play, with arbitrary rules, and yet whose progress is of supreme and abiding concern to each and every one of us.

This great work is a monument to play, in all its senses, not least the play of light and the play of ideas, both equally insubstantial and yet the essence of reality, eloquent as the silence of a great, roofless Cathedral. Out of the Ruin of Faith, Bergman has wrought a Peace that passeth understanding. And it is in this ultimate by-passing of the relentless structures of intellect that Bergman finally achieves the resolution of his productive neuroses, in a truly magical film whose every phase is as inevitable as breathing, or the changeable and unimpeded weather.

As the grandmother reflects. at last, 'I don't want to put Life together anymore. I just leave it broken. Strangely, it seems better that way.'

Death, in the end, is not a calamity, but the choice of all who have truly known Life. In other words, to choose Life is to accept its Dark partner, Death. And to accept each as part of the family group, even though they seem complete misfits there.

The old lady, with Strindberg's Dream-play in her lap, knows at last that the whole history of her family is only a personal reverie. And yet how much more real it seems than her son Carl's immature and somewhat absurd, angst-ridden railings against 'cruel Fate'!

Had he only accepted his patient wife's gently sympathetic injunction to 'Never mind' the Professor would have been both wiser and happier, enduring with patient fortitude the oceanic inconsequentialities of life's real Mystery, and attending far less to the trivial pseudo-mysteries of his solipsistic men's club. All his morbid rationalising is precisely as much use in real life as the usual state of alcoholic befuddlement which is the only serious pursuit of this club.

Reason as befuddlement; The sleep of reason as deliverance. With saint-like humility, Bergman gives us back our ordinary human life, as he surrenders his exceptional life in films. But he knows that the ghost of this life will always be with us. His anguished worldliness will haunt us - as the Ghost of Hamlet's father must haunt Alexander - forever.

I am not one for putting up idols on pedestals; mostly Bergman's films leave me tepid or even cold. But Fanny och Alexander is a splendid production, beautifully made, so superb it even evokes feelings of having come from a novel. Excellent characterization throughout, all the way down the cast, lending that magic touch to the costuming of the early 1900s. Mesmerising throughout, the film is not a single minute too long. The development of the story-line is superbly handled in an absorbing and coherent manner, manifesting the great empathy between director and actors. If the cinematography is visual poetry, the script is philosophical and full of awareness or consciousness of things in life, but not at a pretentious, abstract and theoretical level, but at a real human dimension.

If you only have 10 videos in your collection, Fanny och Alexander should be one of them. My vote is a bit higher than the IMDb average.

These comments refer to the 3-hour version.