FANNY AND ALEXANDER d: Ingmar Bergman
Fanny och Alexander / Fanny & Alexander (1982)
Direction and Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cast: Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Ewa Fröling, Börje Ahlstedt, Jan Malmsjö, Allan Edwall, Gunn Wållgren, Jarl Kulle , Erland Josephson, Pernilla August, Harriet Andersson, Stina Ekblad, Mats Bergman, Gunnar Björnstrand, Lena Olin
Bertil Guve, Pernilla Allwin in Fanny and Alexander
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Why Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 final ‘filmic film,’ Fanny och Alexander / Fanny & Alexander bears the appellation it does is a mystery — one of many in the film — since the first titular character, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) is at best a third- or fourth-level supporting character. In fact, in the three-hour theatrical version she is not even mentioned by name for nearly an hour into the film.
Fanny & Alexander should have been called "Alexander & Fanny," or simply "Alexander," since it most closely follows two years in the life of young, handsome, brown-haired Alexander Ekdahl (Bertil Guve) — the original ‘boy who sees dead people’ — from 1907 to 1909.
Better yet, it should have been called "The Ekdahls," for that whole family is central to the film, especially Fanny and Alexander’s beautiful blonde mother Emilie, played by Ewa Fröling (a more intellectual, sensuous, and earth-motherish version of Denise Richards), who bears a remarkable facial resemblance to Bertil Guve, especially in the cheekbones and puffy lips. The actress’ deep, gorgeous blue eyes hold the viewer’s attention as do the eyes of Liv Ullmann, who was originally offered the part but turned it down.
As I mentioned earlier, there are many things that do not make sense in Fanny & Alexander — both in the internal narrative and the external aspects of the tale — but this is not necessarily a bad thing.
The theatrical version won four Academy Awards, but it is the 312-minute television series that is unquestionably a great film, even though it lacks the unadorned greatness of earlier Bergman classics such as Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, or, most cogently, Scenes from a Marriage. The last title was Bergman’s 1973 TV miniseries that was also released theatrically in a truncated form; it’s a better film than Fanny & Alexander, especially when comparing the shorter versions.
The big-screen version of Fanny & Alexander, for instance, feels chopped up, having too many plot holes as a result of some questionable editing by Bergman. Why, for instance, does he retain any of the stand-alone scenes of Carl Ekdahl (Börje Ahlstedt, who gained fame in the I Am Curious films of Vilgot Sjöman) and his marital woes, since they go nowhere and contribute nothing to the denouement? (That character’s best scene shows him farting out a burning candlestick to entertain the children. A clear example that leaving just bits of a plot thread does no good to the film.)
On the other hand, there are a number of scenes from the longer version that should never have been removed, e.g., the sequence showing Alexander’s run-in with the ghosts of the daughters of the evil Bishop Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjö — Peter, the feckless friend to Erland Josephson’s Johan, in Scenes from a Marriage), who torment and puke on him; or the dramatic showdown between Carl, Gustav Adolf (Jarl Kulle), and the Bishop, after they have engineered the rescue of the children from the Bishop’s home, and revealed the Bishop as a philanderer who owes 110,000 kronor in debts.\
Yet, Fanny & Alexander deserves its place in the Bergman canon, even if it does occasionally suffer from some of what can be labeled ‘old artist’s syndrome,’ i.e., the tendency to over-sentimentalize the past. (Bergman was 64 when Fanny & Alexander was released.) What makes it work, especially in the longer version, is that it leisurely sets up the characters of the tale, without telling us any extraneous matter that is not important later in the film. There is no ‘fat,’ so to speak. This allows non-Bergmaniacs to be lulled into the tale’s more traditional narrative start — which is more emotional than intellectual — before Bergman wallops the viewer with his deep and angst-ridden themes viewers either love or hate. A key to this transition are the primal screams that Emilie Ekdahl hurls at the cosmos when she is alone in a room with Oscar’s corpse. From then on, we get the Bergman mainstays: magic, hatred, sex, suffering, atheism, perversion, monstrousness — and it all works.
In some ways, Fanny & Alexander takes the best of the earlier Bergman canon and reworks it beautifully. There is the period setting akin to Wild Strawberries; there is the stench of death, as in The Seventh Seal; there is the agonized preacher, as in Winter Light; there is the hint of Alexander’s sexual abuse — first by family nursemaid Maj (Pernilla Wallgren) and later by the freakishly androgynous Ismael (Stina Ekblad) — reminiscent of The Silence; there is the supernatural, as in Hour of the Wolf and Cries and Whispers, and so on. Fanny & Alexander even opens with a shot of Alexander looking out at the audience, as does the unnamed boy at the start of Persona.
The plot is basically as follows:
The three sons of the widowed Helena are involved in local business and in the theater. They are Gustav Adolf, Carl, and Oscar, who is Fanny and Alexander’s father, and much older than his beautiful wife. Then there is Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson), the Jewish family friend and ex-lover of Helena Ekdahl. With his nephew Aron (Mats Bergman, the director’s son), Isak runs the local puppet and magic shop in town. Aron’s brother Ismael is locked away because he is either dangerous, preternaturally gifted, or both.
When Oscar suddenly dies during a rehearsal for Hamlet — whose narrative provides this tale’s spine — everything changes for the worse. Bishop Vergerus insinuates himself into the life and heart of Emilie Ekdahl; a year after Oscar’s death, they marry, thus dooming the two children to life under the psychotic Bishop’s thumb.
As the film goes on, especially in the shorter version, Emilie’s reasons for this obviously ill match are never made clear, but in the longer version we early on learn that the young and beautiful Emilie has had lovers behind Oscar’s back, and perhaps she feels she needs to atone for betraying her dead husband by punishing or cleansing herself with a life of asceticism with the Bishop.
We also learn that the Bishop’s first wife and two daughters drowned fifteen years earlier, possibly because of the Bishop’s wrongdoing. The Bishop, in fact, turns out to be one of the great portraits of pure evil in film history, making life hell for Alexander.
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Tags: Bertil Guve, Classic Movies, Ewa Fröling, Fanny and Alexander, Film Reviews, Ingmar Bergman, Jan Malmsjö, Oscar 1983, Oscar Movies, Pernilla Allwin, Religion
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