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Ingmar Bergman intended Fanny and Alexander to be his last feature. Even though Saraband is quite superb, this film is a more fitting eulogy to Bergman’s body of work. All throughout his career, he asked questions and explored matters concerning God, family, death and human nature itself. Whereas he was very specific thematically in most of his films, Bergman seemingly faces all these ruminations head-on through an epic existentialist bonanza. This excess may invite lots of detractors, especially in the light of it being apparently his most accessible film. But that is not an entirely bad thing, particularly when Bergman makes the abstract more discernible without trivializing it.

Fanny and Alexander features an all-star cast to populate the vibrant Ekdahl household in a bourgeoisie Swedish town. However, the film ultimately anchors itself upon the performances of Pernilla Allwin and Bertil Guve as Fanny and Alexander, respectively. Not to sound hyperbolic, I believe that these performances are comparable in their greatness to those in The Night of the Hunter and Forbidden Games. They project an innocence that only Bergman can capture with his visual eye. But these child actors are also able to breathe a complexity into their characters, allowing them to stand in parallel to the more seasoned actors in the film.

By purposely making this his valedictory contribution to cinema, Bergman gives it his all in delivering cinematic magic. Like the matriarch in the film, Bergman presides over his oeuvre by looking forward and not looking back. By doing so, Fanny and Alexander unexpectedly becomes a radical artistic departure for him and a covenant to his devoted audience that he never lost that fire in filmmaking.

I certainly admired the theatrical cut of Fanny and Alexander and thought it a fine film, but for a movie so loved by film buffs, I was wondering what I was missing. Turns out I was missing 124 ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL minutes that are thankfully included in the television version. This extra time is needed as Bergman’s characters are so rich and real that they flourish with more space to breath. So much is going on and so many themes explored that it could have justified being even longer. Ironically, the addition of numbered episodes allows the whole to seem less episodic.

Most important is how the extra time affects the supernatural elements of the story. In the theatrical cut, the magic emanating from the Jacobi household seems like a sharp tonal shift that requires a suspension of disbelief. The television version lays this groundwork much more fully with ghostly visitations and more of a spiritual undertone permeating throughout. Now, when Isac screams and the children’s image appears to the Bishop while they are presumably still it the box, it’s a powerful moment, not a WTF moment.

In a film with nothing but great performances, I was especially struck by Jan Malmsjö’s villainous turn as the Bishop. He invests his character with more than enough menace to make him truly hateful, but he also allows us to see his intelligence and thinking process creating much the same effect as Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds. The contrast of his cold and barren fortress against both the ornate warmth of the Ekdahl household and the puppet filled chaos of Jacobi’s home is a striking as the characters themselves.

Issues of faith, family and theater (known Bergman obsessions) are fully explored with the twist of the child’s eye point of view. There are a lot of balls in the air and not one of them is dropped. The ending speech about the “little world” punctuated by actual babies may indeed be sentimental, but Bergman fully earns the right with this masterpiece.

A sweeping and immersive 312 minute masterpiece. A keen exploration on imagination, guilt and various usual Bergman themes, Fanny och Alexander possesses a wide range of themes that is wholly engaging. Also, Nykvist cinematography is fantastic as usual and the priest in particular is a very good actor. Although I would have preferred it more if he were Anders Ek, the priest in Cries and Whispers. I really have nothing to say about the film because I went in knowing nothing and found it fantastic precisely because I knew nothing. Do yourself a favour and only see this after seeing many of Bergman’s works though, this is supposedly his magnum opus and his farewell to cinema.

In a long career filled with masterpieces such as Wild Stawberries, The Seventh Seal, Cries & Whispers and Scenes From a Marriage, this film could very well be his greatest. It’s the story of the Ekdahl family, specifically Fanny and her brother Alexander. Dealing with Christianity, repentance, authority, the paranormal and of course, existentialism, the film succeeds in being both magical and realistic. A certifiable original by one of the true geniuses of cinema, Fanny & Alexander is an amazing experience regardless of which of the many different cuts you see (go for the 312 minute version – that’s the fullest one).

(Originally written July 11, 2007)

“If a big know-it-all like him punishes a runt like me for so little then he’s just the dirty bastard I suspect he is.” – Alexander Ekdahl on God

At the center of this story is a young boy named Alexander Ekdahl, and most of the movie is seen from his perspective. After the death of his father Oscar, he and his sister Fanny find themselves bounded by the restrictions of their stepfather, a Lutheran Bishop named Edvard Vergerus. The Bishop is a strict man who violently punishes Alexander for the smallest white lies and stories, in stark contrast with the actual father Oscar, who was an actor and himself made up fantastical stories for his children. The movie seeks to contrast a world of regulation and how it pales in comparison to a world of imagination but at the same time show how these two worlds are necessarily intertwined in the mind of Alexander.

This film is full of such raw emotion and passion because of a connection established with the characters. Although much of my connection to the characters is due to the sheer length of the film, this intimacy must be attributed to the rich dialogue that Ingmar Bergman wrote and the passion with which the actors performed. More so than any other of Bergman’s work, I felt that Bergman’s direction allowing the performances to be very immediate and honest. The way in which the voices are placed in the sound mix allowed me to hear the actors inhale and exhale, most notably in a speech given by Oscar at the beginning of the film. Because of the way Bergman is able to capture this emotion, this comes across as one of Bergman’s most human films.

This is the only Bergman film I have seen in color, and the way that the costumes and sets are coordinated in terms of colors and textures is stunning even today. Instead of using the sets to simply set as is often done with period pieces, a mood is established whether it is the cold, desolate house of the Bishop with its barred windows, the darkness and mysteriousness of Isak Jacobi’s home with the exotic puppets and dolls, and the extravagance of the Ekdahl household. The details are so very important, allowing this film to come off as very authentic, and one can sense the passion with which Bergman made this film through the elaborate design and the way in which the design contributes to the film.

The Bishop seems almost hyperbolically villainous in the film, but it is absolutely necessary for this to be the case because of the fact that we see this character through the eyes of Alexander who absolutely hates his stepfather. When his mother gets married to the Bishop, he finds himself seeing the ghost of his father walking around. This is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the play in which Oscar was playing the ghost of Old Hamlet when he fell into the sickness that ultimately brought him to his death. When the ghost comes on screen, it is a believable integration into Alexander’s reality because we are so engrossed in his vision of the world. These fantasies become very real and haunting.

The film stirred such a variety of emotions inside of me. I was absolutely furious whenever Bishop Edvard Vergerus was onscreen because he is very much the archetypical condescending moralist that any child comes to despise. His character helps to once again integrate Bergman’s suspicion of God and religion into the film. It becomes nearly impossible for Alexander and for me as an audience member to reconcile the notion of love and violent punishment in the same way that the Bishop does in this film. The film also made me want to cry out for joy when Gustav Adolf Ekdahl stands up against the Bishop. Although he doesn’t succeed and is a bit impulsive, it’s his concern for the children and the conviction with which he voices when I was feeling that I was riled up. I was equally repulsed and sad when Oscar attempted to reach out to Alexander, scared because I identified with Alexander but also saddened by the death of this great man that will only bring tragedy for the Ekdahl family.

Although a difficult call in a film full with pitch-perfect performances, perhaps the richest performance in the film comes from Ewa Froling as Emilie Ekdahl, the mother of Fanny and Alexander. She is a character who is unable to pin down her own emotions, unable to determine whether she wants to stay with or run away from the Bishop. Her character is never completely revealed to us; she remains a mystery until towards the end of the film. Her performance reveals a sense of torment; she tries to explain to Alexander that she is not Gertrude from Hamlet even though everyone including herself knows the horror of what she has done.

There is so much in this film to talk about because it is such an intricate drama with such an engrossing story. There is nothing specific that I can pin down as a flaw for this film. I want to only express one concern—I saw the 312-minute television director’s cut of the film, and it was a film that felt so whole and beautiful. Does the film have nearly the same sense of imagination and richness in its 188-minute theatrical cut? If I had seen the butchered version which Bergman himself was reluctant to make, would I still have the confidence to this call this work his greatest achievement?

To this date, this is the best Criterion release in my opinion (and I’m talking about the TV, Theater, and Making of Box set). I’ve never saw the full version prior to this, just the 3+ hour theatrical version and I always thought it was a great movie but the TV version is a complete and utter masterpiece and his greatest work. You must see the full version.. the theatrical edit misses alot of the mythical overtones as well as many other critical details and monologues.

This is pure Bergman with his mix of the Bergman nihilism, religious angst, his morbid sense of humor, our constant struggle with god. Brilliant writing. .. only Bergman can get away with a 10 minute on screen monologues.. or the only person that had the balls to do it.

The cinematography is absolutely amazing.. note the scene where Emilie visits her mother-in-law in secret… you can almost feel the Swedish summer

The making of is a masterpiece in itself.