Wild Strawberries (1957)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1957.
Plot
Isak Borg, a 78-year-old medical professor, is driving from Stockholm to Lund to receive an honorary degree. His daughter-in-law Marianne rides with him. Along the way they stop at the summer house of Isak’s childhood, pick up three hitchhikers, meet a bickering couple, and Isak has a series of dreams — about a clock with no hands, his own corpse, his dead wife cheating on him, an examination in which the professor is told he’s incompetent, dishonest, and guilty of “indifference.”
The dreams force him to replay the life he actually lived: a marriage he checked out of emotionally, a son he raised to be as cold as himself, a first love (his cousin Sara) he lost to his brother because he couldn’t give her what she needed. By the time he arrives at the ceremony, he’s been stripped of most of the armor that kept him functional for fifty years.
The film ends gently. Isak goes to bed, remembers a summer afternoon by a lake, sees his young parents waving at him from across the water, and smiles.
What It’s About
Wild Strawberries is Bergman’s Proust film. The title refers to a patch of wild strawberries at the summer house — same mechanism as Proust’s madeleine, a sensory detail that cracks time open and drops the narrator back into childhood. The roadside stops become involuntary memory triggers. Past and present happen on the same road.
It’s also very clearly a response to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Same plot skeleton: a high-status professional realizes late in life that his life was not a life — that he had rank and competence and no love. The difference is Bergman’s mercy. Ivan Ilyich gets his awakening at the last possible minute and dies. Isak gets his awakening a few years early and is granted a kind of reconciliation — not forgiveness, exactly, but the ability to smile again.
The Freudian layer runs through the dreams. Isak’s dream of a clock without hands is a near-textbook anxiety dream. The examination dream is superego judgment in pure form. The corpse-dream is mortality anxiety / repressed fear of death surfacing now that his body can’t suppress it. Bergman doesn’t need to tell you he’s read Freud; the dream grammar is correct.
What keeps the film warm (a word not usually applied to Bergman) is Victor Sjöström — a legendary silent-era director Bergman cast as Isak — whose face carries half a century of Swedish cinema’s worth of melancholy. When Isak softens, you believe it.
Connections
- Ingmar Bergman — his warmest film; still one of his most popular
- Marcel Proust — the strawberries as Proustian trigger; involuntary memory as structure
- Leo Tolstoy — The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the direct literary parent
- Dream Psychology — dream sequences read as textbook Freudian anxiety dreams
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle — the late-life confrontation with the death drive
Lineage
Predecessors: Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich; Proust; Strindberg’s A Dream Play; Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (the structure of visiting your own past under duress).
Successors: Kurosawa’s Ikiru (released 1952, before Wild Strawberries — but these two films are siblings); Michael Haneke’s Amour; Alexander Payne’s Nebraska; Pixar’s Up.