One of the most spiritual and profound directors in all of film is Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. “Fanny and Alexander” was intended to be his last film, and it is his most autobiographical and complex. At 3:08, a theatrically trimmed version from the original 5+ hours, “Fanny and Alexander” is deep, engaging and life encompassing in the many themes it evokes.
Really, it has enough themes for five movies. Yet every character is brilliantly complex and challenged. Even the varying set pieces and ideas Bergman considers never feel thin. They are rich tapestries to this broader story, at times being peaceful and elegiac and at others being cold and ghastly.
“Fanny and Alexander’s” quasi ghost story succeeds so fully because Bergman’s chilling, uncertain tone persists throughout the film. Each scene is directed with such grace and haunting beauty. This is a film that seduces and entrances you.
Much of the film is seen from the perspective of the young boy Alexander, and it is his fragile view that makes the film so fascinating. In his life, he shares pleasant holidays and shattering deaths with his family. To think that the same movie can show such frivolity in an early Christmas Eve scene and then contrast it with one of the most agonizing mourning scenes I’ve ever seen is remarkable. The scene I describe is Alexander’s mother peering through the open door to his mother’s bedroom after her husband has passed, and her screaming is all the more scary because we remain as distant and unable to help as Alexander.
From here, the mother remarries a stringent bishop who rules his Gothic castle of a house with an iron fist. No possessions, no luxuries, no books, no good food and bars on the children’s window. Alexander tells a ghost story that the bishop locked his previous family in a room without nourishment for five days until they tried to escape and drowned in a river. The resulting punishment scene between stepfather and son is one of the film’s more brilliantly engaging and cerebral moments, all capped with Alexander’s pain seen not through the onlookers’ eyes but his own.
Bergman began his career in the early ’50s and mid ’60s in Sweden. His films existed in almost another world from the new forms of cinema exploding in France, Italy and Japan. He reveled in the dreamlike quality of Fellini and Kurosawa but loathed the cynical boredom perpetuated in all of the Godard and Antonioni masterpieces. His films consider large themes that American films of the time simply weren’t asking, and although they never had the Hollywood ending they also weren’t cynical in nature.
The ending of “Fanny and Alexander” lies in an equally perplexing but authentic middle ground, and this film was released in a time when American cinema was at just of much of an impasse. It’s a marvelous, immersive, cinematic experience.