on the road
by Douglas Messerli
Ingmar Bergman (writer and director)
Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) / 1957
For those who might share some of my loss of recall, I’ll briefly
describe the story. The 78-year-old doctor Isak Borg (played to perfection by
Victor Sjöström) self-admittedly has withdrawn from others, involving himself
in his scientific research. A doctor of some note, Borg is to be awarded a
special degree in medicine on the day we encounter him, and must travel from
his home in Stockholm to Lund for the ceremonies.
During the early morning hours, however, Borg has frightening dreams—or
at least highly symbolic ones. He finds himself on a street where most of the
houses are in bad repair and are closed up. Attempting to check the time, he
discovers that the hands of all the clocks, including his own pocket watch,
have disappeared. Soon after he comes upon a man who, when he touches him,
turns into dust. Just as suddenly an unattended hearse, led by horses, rushes
into the street, its wheels becoming caught in the streetlight. When one wheel
finally is dislodged, the coffin falls from the leaning hearse, and as the
doctor goes forward to put the dead man’s hand back into the box, the hand
grabs him, clearly attempting to pull Borg into the coffin with it—the dead man
appearing to be Borg himself.
I find this scene—the one I recalled from my childhood—the weakest of
the film. Although Bergman’s images are quite powerful (the use of bright white
light and shade in these scenes is truly memorable), the dream is an almost
hackneyed vision of the man’s fear of impending death, paralleling, of course,
his loneliness in which he has entrapped himself. The director, fortunately,
does not make a great deal of this sequence—it is what it is, a dream of
death—and when the doctor later attempts to relate the events of his dream to
his daughter-in-law, he is told that she is disinterested. Thus we are saved
any further analysis. For, despite Bergman’s use of dream imagery elsewhere in
this film and in others of his works, the Swedish master has little connection
with the surreal images of Buñuel, Fellini, or even Hitchcock. Rather, Bergman
is at heart a psychological realist, and his images function simply as outward
manifestations of human fears and doubts.
Clearly something is amiss in the old man’s state of mind. Upon
awakening, accordingly, Borg determines to change his plans; instead of flying
to Lund, he will drive, allowing himself the sixteen hours before the event to
revisit his childhood summer house and the region where he lived as a young
country doctor. Agda, his housekeeper, who has been looking forward to the
flight and ceremony, is furious, but his daughter-in-law Marianne, who has temporarily
left her husband and has been living in Borg’s house, is determined to join her
father on his voyage, returning to her husband and her previous life.
It is Sjöström’s great acting that saves Borg from becoming a kind of pained scapegoat; while clearly his Borg is hurt by Marianne’s pronouncements, the character retains a wise sense of irony, which plays nicely against the slings and arrows his figure must face throughout the day.
Coming upon the house where he grew up, Borg again dreams, but this time
the images he conjures up are those of the past, as he is forced to watch his
beloved Sara flirting with and accepting the love of another man. The
conversation he overhears reveals his own sense of perfection, his high ideals
regarding himself and others that make loving him quite unbearable. Later
scenes at the dinner table and elsewhere further develop both the sense of a
loving family and a mother, like her son, somewhat cold of heart.
When Borg awakens from his daydream/memory, a young woman—also named
Sara (played like Borg’s Sara by the beautiful Bibi Andersson)—asks if she
might join them in their travels, and as quickly as she is accepted she, in
turn, is joined by her two male companions, Viktor and Anders, who spend much
of the remaining journey arguing about the existence of God and other
philosophical issues of the young. In short, Borg is forced on this journey
into the past to encounter also the difficulties of middle age and youth as
well.
Suddenly, a car swerves in front of
them, sending both vehicles off the road. In what is one of the most perverse
events of the journey, the fighting couple now also accompanies them. The
couple engage in a horrifying battle of language, reminding one of the later
literary figures Martha and George of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. As Sten Altman says of himself and
his wife: “Me and my wife are dependent on each other. It is out of selfish
reasons we haven't beaten each other to death a long time ago.” Their ongoing
quarrel becomes so rancorous that Marianne, now driving the large automobile,
finally stops and orders them out, “for the children’s sake.”
A stop along the way for gas elicits
the joy of a couple who knew the kindly doctor as children, and reveals that
Borg is still loved throughout the area. So does Marianne and the viewer
discover that Borg was once, perhaps, a loving, caring being. Compared with his
95-year-old mother, whom they next visit, he is nearly a model of humane
behavior. Mistaking Marianne for Borg’s long-dead wife, she orders her out of
the house. Once she is told who Marianne is, the mother sullenly outlines the
failures of her children, serving up an old box of their toys for comment,
offering Borg a watch without any hands—like the clocks of his early morning
nightmare.
As Marianne later reports, the mother “is as cold as ice,” fearing that
the behavior has been inherited, passed on from mother to son to Evald as well.
She reveals to her father-in-law that the separation between her and Evald has
come about because she discovered she was pregnant, Evald refusing to have the
child she is determined to bear.
Borg now is forced to understand the
effects of cutting off others from himself and reimagines his own wife’s love
affairs, as the woman describes to her lover how she will be coldly forgiven
for her sexual indiscretions, but allowed no mercy, no further love. Another
dream in which the doctor’s medical knowledge is examined and found failing
ends his memorable journey.
Borg’s ceremony is a solemn one, and all
are impressed. Finally, having come to understand that he has entrapped himself
in his own emptiness, the doctor apologizes to his housekeeper—who despite her
morning threats has turned up at Evald’s house. Agda is so startled by his
statement that she wonders about his health. When he goes even further to
suggest that they call one another by their first name, she refuses; yet,
Bergman, as always, allows his characters complete humanity, as she suggests
that her bedroom door will be left ajar, in case he needs her in the night.
In short, order and love is restored.
Borg’s young travelers award him a fond farewell, Sara calling up to his
bedroom window, “Good-bye, father Isak. Can't you see you're the one I love?
Today, tomorrow, and forever.” Evald reports that Marianne will remain—and get
her way. But when the father attempts to tell his son to forget about his debt,
Evald interrupts, assuring him it will be paid. The trip that Borg has made has
evidently redeemed his life, but it is a journey which ultimately he can share
with no one else; wisdom, redeemed faith—whatever one calls it—cannot be
shared, but merely reminds each of us that, although we must reach out to one
another in order to survive, we remain alone.
Los
Angeles, September 2, 2007
Reprinted
from World Cinema
Review (September 2007).
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