The Living and the Dead
Fanny and Alexander, by Ingmar Bergman
By Charlie Bertsch
Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander is an easy film to remember and a hard film to remember correctly.
Watching the Swedish director’s cinematic swansong today proves that the hype surrounding its 1982 release was justified.
Audiences that appreciated it then will surely appreciate it now, maybe more so. Yet, the manner of that appreciation may be different.
When I decided to revisit the picture in 2021, I was immediately reminded of how important it was to me as a teenager.
Fanny and Alexander and Jean-Jacques Beneix’s Diva were the first foreign films I saw. They made me fall in love with cinema, pointing me down a path that would eventually lead to my writing pieces like this one.
A third of the way into Bergman’s film, though, I realised that my happy memories of watching it at age fourteen were spotty and deceptive.
The film I recalled so vividly was not the film on the screen in front of me.
By the time I had reached the end of Fanny and Alexander’s three-plus hours, it had become abundantly clear that I had been too young and inexperienced to understand it as a teenager.
But I also had the impression that my misremembering wasn’t simply the byproduct of my naïveté. There was something objective about Fanny and Alexander that contributed to its reception being particularly vulnerable to subjective distortion.
Furthermore, Bergman thematises this quality with a strong dose of magical realism. When characters hallucinate, we see what they see.
Even though we suspect that what we are seeing cannot literally be true in the world where Fanny and Alexander takes place, we see it with the same dispassionate clarity of every other scene.
Although the camera position aligns with the position they are seeing from, there are times when we see them from a different angle, reinforcing the sense that the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity has been irreparably breached.
The story’s repeated allusions to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet not only prepare us to discern Oedipal family dynamics – which are plain as day for anyone who knows a little Freud – but remind us that more than one witness can perceive something that transcends the domain of factual verification.
While there is much to love in Fanny and Alexander from an aesthetic perspective—the ensemble cast and mise-en-scène are particularly impressive—much of the story is devoted to something only a sadist would enjoy watching.
This comes as a huge surprise, though.
The first third of the film documents the well-off Ekdahl family’s Christmas celebration. Gathering under the ample roof of the matriarch, Helena, they engage in the communal merriment that people from small, isolated households long for.
After the unexpected death of Helena’s son Oscar, however, his eponymous children are forced to relinquish almost everything they care about after their mother Emilie remarries the viciously austere Bishop Edvard Vergérus.
Alexander – an obvious stand-in for Bergman himself – immediately runs afoul of this stepfather, whose interpretation of Protestant doctrine inspires a perverse minimalism that leaves no room for the boy’s many flights of fancy.
Repeatedly punished for telling stories, Alexander comes to hate Vergérus so passionately that he believes he is personally responsible for what happens to the man,
Although I hadn’t forgotten this part of the story, I thought it was shorter and less severe.
More distressing, as someone who prides himself on having an excellent memory, I had completely forgotten the reason why Fanny and Alexander are sent into exile.
I could recall that their mother remarried, but not why.
Considering that I had decided to revisit Fanny and Alexander during the first holiday season after my father’s death, hoping it would cheer me up, this failure to remember the story was emotionally disastrous.
I didn’t see the narrative pivot coming.
To be sure, the holiday festivities depicted in the film’s first third were less buoyant than I had recalled.
In particular, the drunken abuse the children’s Uncle Carl inflicts on his patient German wife disturbed me now. When I first saw the film, I had very little direct experience of what happens when alcohol exacerbates problematic behaviour.
By the time I saw Fanny and Alexander in 2021, however, I had become intimately acquainted with the impact of addiction on personality.
Despite this scene and others that communicated a melancholy my teenage brain could not yet compute—a tender late-night conversation between Helena and her longtime Jewish lover, Isak, comes to mind—I still convinced myself that the film was wonderfully festive.
That is until Oskar collapsed while rehearsing a production of Hamlet at this theatre company.
Suddenly, Fanny and Alexander transformed from a film that seemed a great way to revive my flagging holiday spirits into one that threatened to amplify my seasonal depression to a perilous degree.
I stopped watching once I reached the scene where Fanny and Alexander hear moaning from the other room, then go to the slightly ajar double doors outside their father’s bedroom, where they and we can see Oscar’s dead body lying in state.
I didn’t want to feel worse than I already did, and I hoped that my happy memories of the film would not be forever dispelled.
But this December, I decided to pick up where I had left off.
I persevered to the end of the theatrical version I had seen as a teenager, then watched the television version that runs nearly 90 minutes longer.
And I am ever so glad that I did.
The parts of Fanny and Alexander that I didn’t remember at all – probably because they were the ones I understood least – make it a vastly more powerful experience.
We see Oscar’s ghost repeatedly, clad all in an off-white summer suit, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father he was playing when a stroke felled him.
First, he stands there, ambiguous.
By the film’s latter stages, however, the ghost has begun to touch and talk, as if the more members of his family believe in him, the more concretely he reenters their lives.
I realised that Oscar was bringing me back in touch with my father, with whom I had watched Fanny and Alexander many years before.
And I finally understood that my inaccurate memories of the film concerned how it bridges the gap between the living and the dead.
One of the most important scenes occurs right after seeing the children suffering in their new home.
Helena is asleep in a chair at her summer home. Then, the camera pulls back to show Oscar sitting at the table across from her. He gets up and moves the camera closer to her but remains silent. Then she stirs, opening her eyes.
“Yes, Oskar, that’s how it is,” she bluntly declares.
Because we lack the antecedent for this pronoun, it can serve as a variable for everything we have witnessed.
How, precisely, is this it?
Like Schrödinger’s Cat, it seems to exist in opposed realms, simultaneously being and non-being, presence and absence.
This is how the dead confront the living, gone but still around.
Later in this conversation, after Oscar tells Helena he is worried about his children, she gives a little speech that sums up the film and her character.
It’s all acting anyway. Some roles are nice, others not so nice. I played a mother. I played Juliet and Margareta. Then suddenly, I played a widow or a grandmother. One role follows the other. The thing is not to shrink from them.
This is the true lesson of Fanny and Alexander, not to mention the rest of Bergman’s mature work. If we can push past our prejudices, we can realise that Helena’s speech also bridges the gap between the living and the dead.
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Screenshot courtesy of Rob Corder. Published under a Creative Commons license.