Wild Strawberries

Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman's 1957 follow-up to the The Seventh Seal, is a "journey" movie. Victor Sjostrom plays Isak Borg, an elderly retired professor of medicine, setting out by car to the University of Lund to receive a Jubilee doctorate degree. With him on the journey is his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin). Along the way, they pick up a bickering couple and three hitchhikers, including effervescent sprite Sara (Bibi Andersson). Borg also experiences some troubling and beautifully realised dream sequences, as well as flashbacks evoked by a visit to the country house of his youth. Through these, we learn of Borg's awareness of his imminent demise and his underlying regret that his personal relationships have always been distant and reserved, especially with his wife and son. With his magnificently aged and infinitely expressive emotional range borne of his years as a silent movie actor, Sjostrom superbly conveys a dawning sense of remorse and self-realisation. However, the performance is almost too good. The central accusation of the film--that the doctor is "utterly cold"--hardly squares with what we see of him on screen. We just have to take Bergman's word for the doctor's past aloofness. Wild Strawberries is so overpoweringly rich and ruminative a film, however, that what should be a major flaw is reduced to a barely visible crack.