Wild Strawberries Review

The opening nightmare is among the most frightening things Bergman shot: empty streets in hard predawn light, a clock without hands, and a hearse that spills a coffin whose occupant is Isak Borg himself. Gunnar Fischer gives dream and waking scenes the same sharp edges, so when the old man walks into the summer house of his youth and watches his family, unseen, it feels less like a flashback than a trespass.

Victor Sjöström, the silent-era director Bergman had idolized, was 78 and in fragile health, and he is in all but one scene. His performance is a slow thaw: courteous, tart and self-satisfied, then stricken when his daughter-in-law Marianne, Ingrid Thulin at her coolest, tells him what she thinks of him. Bibi Andersson plays both the sweetheart who married his brother and a cheerful hitchhiker of the same name, and her brightness is the film's counterweight.

The weaknesses are Bergman's usual ones in smaller doses: the young hitchhikers' debate about God is thin, and the squabbling Alman couple is a device. But the examination dream, in which Isak is told that a doctor's first duty is to ask forgiveness, gives the film a moral center that The Seventh Seal only argues for. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin, and Stanley Kubrick named it his second favorite film.