Ingmar Bergman's road film about an elderly professor confronting his own life. Victor Sjöström's final lead performance.
Sweden, 1957. Isak Borg, a 78-year-old retired professor of medicine, is travelling from Stockholm to Lund to receive an honorary doctorate. He decides at the last moment to drive instead of fly. His daughter-in-law Marianne accompanies him. They pick up three young hitchhikers along the way; they stop at Isak's childhood summer house; they meet various figures from Isak's past. The journey takes approximately a day.
Interspersed with the present-tense travel are Isak's dreams and memories. The opening dream — a clock without hands, a horse-drawn hearse, Isak's own corpse — is the most-discussed sequence in 1950s European art cinema. The film's structure alternates between the road trip, the dreams, and the memories of Isak's young womanhood and early marriage. The film closes on Isak in bed, listening to children playing outside, achieving a small private reconciliation with the life he has lived.
Bergman's casting of Victor Sjöström as Isak Borg was the film's most-significant structural decision. Sjöström was, at 78, the most-distinguished director-actor in Swedish cinema history. He had directed the silent-era classic The Phantom Carriage (1921) — a film Bergman had repeatedly cited as foundational to his own filmmaking. Casting him as the lead in Wild Strawberries was, in some sense, casting the figure of Swedish cinema itself.
Sjöström, who was in poor health during production, reportedly found the shoot difficult. Bergman's exacting working methods and Sjöström's age made the daily production schedule challenging. The performance, however, lands. Sjöström's specific physical presence — the visibly-elderly face, the careful comportment, the genuine fatigue — gives the role a weight that a younger actor playing old age could not have produced. Wild Strawberries was Sjöström's final film performance. He died three years later.
Wild Strawberries's opening dream sequence runs approximately five minutes. Isak walks through an empty city. A clock has no hands. A horse-drawn hearse appears, its wheel breaks, the coffin slides into the street, and the corpse inside is Isak himself, who reaches toward the dreaming Isak from the coffin. The sequence is, by general critical consensus, among the most-influential dream sequences in cinema history.
The technique that makes the sequence work is the absence of explanation. Bergman does not pre-establish the dream as a dream; the audience must work out that Isak is dreaming. The unhinged physical world is presented as if it were continuous with the film's reality. The sequence's influence on subsequent cinematic dream sequences (David Lynch's filmography, particularly, is unimaginable without it) is substantial.
What makes Wild Strawberries unusual among Bergman's filmography is its tonal warmth. Persona (1966), The Seventh Seal (1957), Cries and Whispers (1972), and most of Bergman's other major work are tonally severe. Wild Strawberries is, on its surface, quieter. Isak's life has been disappointing but not catastrophic. His daughter-in-law is unhappy but functional. His childhood memories are bittersweet but not traumatic.
The film's argument is that the question of whether a life has been worthwhile is, structurally, a question that can be addressed without melodrama. Isak's reconciliation with what he has been is small, partial, and consistent with the kind of reconciliation that elderly people actually achieve in their final years. The film is, in some sense, more-honest about old age than the more-dramatic Bergman entries. It is also, for many viewers, the most-emotionally-accessible Bergman film.