Wild Strawberries

It's been too long; I enjoy writing, but now that I have a few big ideas out of my chest and onto the internets, I feel less obliged to write. But last night I watched Wild Strawberries by Ingmar Bergman.

This is one of my favorite movies/films. I doubt any single work of literature or film has influenced me more, and I find it aesthetically haunting and beautiful. I have watched it more times than almost any other movie - possible exceptions include Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Grosse Pointe Blank, but neither of those come close on impact. Bergman's film illustrates a few simple lessons, almost cliches, of which I regularly need to be reminded.

The Plot: septuagenarian medical doctor/professor/self-described pedant must travel to Lund to receive a prestigious life-time achievement award. We meet the protagonist, Isak Borg, the morning of the trip, after a night full of strange dreams. He wakes early, and so decides to scrap his air-travel plans for a roadtrip. His daughter-in-law, who is auspiciously and surprisingly staying with him, asks to go with him and return to her husband/his son in Lund. Along the way they detour at his mother's house and the family's old summer cottage, they meet with three allegorical hitchhikers and an abusively antagonistic married couple, and Isak has a few more naps with strange dreams. Upon arriving in Lund, Isak's son and daughter-in-law are somewhat reconciled, as Isak attempts (and fails?) to share some glimpse of his new wisdom with his icy son.

Isak Borg enjoys being alone, at least apparently. He and his live-in housekeeper Agda share a surprisingly intimate fight when he wakes her with the changed plans. And again, although he is at first cold and formal with his daughter-in-law ("You only like me around the house like a cat" she says. "A cat, or a human being," he inadequately responds), by the end of the trip they, too, have an affable intimacy. The final scene of the movie includes a beautiful kiss, she sitting on the edge of his guest bed in Lund, asking him about her shoes, and kissing him very fondly on the cheek. His mother demonstrates part of this desire/rejection of company: when visiting, she is terribly formal and unfriendly, but when they make a show of leaving she, surprisingly and subtly, pressures them to stay for tea. "No one visits me here anymore, not that I mind," she says, but we are not convinced as she thumbs through her mostly deceased children's old toys.

The love and respect paradox is another big theme. Isak Borg is clearly respected, and takes great care in matters of honor. But apparently he does not expect any fondness from anyone. Pumping gas in a region where he began his medical career, he visits with a young couple who he must have known back then. They offer his gas for free, and discuss naming their expected child Isak. As he tries to pay, the mechanic says, "We can do the right thing, too. Everyone in this region has not forgotten. Some things cannot be repaid, even with gas." Isak replies, to himself, "Maybe I should have stayed here." In Isak's second dream, dosing in the strawberry patch at the old summer home, he dreams of his old flame Sara, who ended up marrying Isak's promiscuous cousin. Breaking down after being taunted for kissing the cousin instead of her beau Isak, Sara sobs, "Isak is so good, so high above me. He makes me feel so low. He wants to read poetry and only kiss in the dark." In a later dream, Isak remembers a scene where he witnessed his wife's rape (?). After the fact, sitting in the woods with her pseudo-assailant, she says, "I will go tell Isak. I know exactly what he will say. That he understands perfectly. That I am not to blame. That I am hysterical and should take a sleeping pill to calm my nerves." However, the main characters of our roadtrip seem fond of Isak: Agda, after 30 years of close service; the tag-alongs, perhaps only because of their youthful exuberance ("I am a virgin, that is why I am so cheeky. Also, I smoke a pipe."); and the daughter-in-law, but only after lunch.

So far, Isak does not try for friendship. He speaks of himself as cold-dead already. But he does look for it, and find it. The roadtrip transforms him in his late years. I think his relationship with his daughter-in-law most clearly shows this, as they converse during the whole trip, as she witnesses his past and his present state, and slowly warms to him as he himself lowers his walls of old-world gentility and 'honor'.

Oh, but no favorite movie of mine would be complete without a full-frontal assault on mortality. Ingmar Bergman is most famous for his treatment of death in Seventh Seal, which includes the prototypes for such famous scenes as playing chess with death, the dance of death, and comically long death throws. But I prefer the treatment Bergman gives to Isak Borg, our elderly hero. The first scene of the movie is the first dream, almost entirely silent, shot in high-contrast black and white, where each noise (squeaking cart, footsteps on pavement) are painfully sharp and loud. Isak is lost in a strange city of abandoned buildings. He looks at a clock above the street and then at his pocket-watch (not his but his father's, it turns out) - both are without hands. He tries to ask for directions from a suddenly appeared shape, but the head has no face, and the body collapses to the ground and melts. A funeral carriage approaches, breaks, and the coffin falls open onto the ground. Guess who is inside but Isak, pulling our protagonist down into the coffin!

Again, midway, while dozing after lunch, during the dream which includes his wife's rape, Isak is being tested in medicine by the abusive husband they had recently ejected from their car. He fails miserably, cannot remember anything. He cannot even tell if a woman is alive or dead. The audience/judging panel for his examination is not amused.

Finally, just before arriving in Lund, Isak and his daughter-in-law discuss the parameters and rationale of her having stayed with him. She was pregnant (and smoking, yes), and Isak's son did not want the child. She tells of when she broke the news to the son; he said, "I was an unwanted child in a loveless marriage.... My dream is to be dead. Stone dead. I will not have any responsibility that prevents me from leaving this world at the precise moment of my choosing." Isak is surprised to hear this - but he is so young! and so successful! and you (his wife) are with child! But Isak knows this feeling in himself, too.

I think it is our mortality that defines us. Life is for the living, sure, and only the most nihilistic focus on their death. But we do die. We are surrounded by death. The open secret of beautiful sunny days is that they end, and will never return. Our time does tick by, on clocks with hands (note - my philosophical obsession with watches developed with my love of this movie). Focusing on death is for the dying, but even the elderly Isak, by the end, is not obsessed. He hopes to cure his son's death wish. Perhaps it is the ability to feel the sun on beautiful days, to feel the love and affection of real friends, that separates life from cold, respectable, honorable, codified, legalistic death. Forgive the strict rules of debt repayment, Isak! Your son's love is more important.

1200 words. A triumphant return? And for tomorrow (just so I don't have an excuse) I want to write on either my favorite theologians, good literature, or affection.