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.