Smultronstället

Smultronstället (Wild strawberries in Spain and Mexico, When the day flees in Argentina) is a 1957 Swedish drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. The cast includes Victor Sjöström, in what would be his last appearance on film, as the character main character, and several of the recurring actors in Bergman's films such as Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand and Max von Sydow. The filmmaker wrote the script shortly after the release of The Seventh Seal while he was hospitalized in Stockholm.

In Spain it was translated as Wild Strawberries. However, Smultronstället does not refer only to the wild or wild strawberry - which would be the literal translation of the title - but also to the place and date, spring, in which it grows.

The story tells of the journey of the elderly professor Isak Borg from Stockholm to Lund in the company of his daughter-in-law and three young people, and during which he reflects on life, death and human existence. It is considered one of the most emotional and optimistic films by the Swedish director, so much so that the Vatican selected it as one of the forty-five best films in the history of cinema.

Smultronstället received critical acclaim and won awards such as the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, in addition to having an Oscar nomination in the best original screenplay category.

Argument

Doctor Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) is an elderly professor who, at 78, must go to Lund University to celebrate his appointment as an honorary doctor. The night before leaving, the professor suffers a nightmare in which he gets lost in a deserted neighborhood where he finds a man with a deformed face and a horse-drawn hearse that collides with a lamppost. The vehicle carries the corpse of the professor, who extends his hand to hold his son. double, which causes the end of the dream. Once awake, Borg decides to make the trip by car instead of by plane, as his housekeeper, Agda (Jullan Kindahl), had organized. Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), wife of his son Evald and who had been living for a few weeks with him, she decides to accompany him to Lund, where he resides.

During the journey, Marianne reproaches him for being selfish, concerned only with himself and whom his own son hates. After hearing her reprimands, Borg decides to take another path and show him a house where he lived with his family. during the summers of his first twenty years of life. There he imagines a scene from his youth, in which the protagonist is his cousin and fiancée Sara (Bibi Andersson), who is picking strawberries and who is courted by Sigfrid (Per Sjöstrand), one of Isak's brothers. The dream continues inside the house, where his family celebrates Uncle Aron's (Yngve Nordwall) birthday. The protagonist is then awakened from his dream by a young woman named Sara (also played by Andersson) who is heading to Italy in the company of her friends. two suitors, Anders (Folke Sundquist) and Viktor (Björn Bjelfvenstam), who join the trip.

After suffering a minor car accident with the Alman couple (Gunnar Sjöberg and Gunnel Broström) and refueling at Henrik Åkerman's (Max von Sydow) gas station, who thanks Borg for his work as a doctor, the group meets He stops to eat, at which point Anders and Viktor argue about belief in God. After the meal, the professor takes the opportunity to visit his mother (Naima Wifstrand) with her daughter-in-law. Mrs. Borg reproaches Marianne for not having children and not taking care of her husband and shows her son some objects from her childhood. and his brothers, all of them already deceased.

In the car, the protagonist has another dream in which Sara – his former fiancée – speaks directly to him, reproaches him for being an old man unlike her and announces that he will marry Sigfrid. Sara walks away to pick up one of his nephews and then enters a house where Sigfrid is waiting for him. Isak approaches it and after knocking on the door he is received by Mr. Alman who accompanies him to a classroom where he examines him. The professor is incapable of seeing through a microscope, he ignores the first duty of a doctor—to ask for forgiveness—and certifies a living patient as dead. Faced with such events, Mr. Alman describes him as incompetent and takes him to the forest where he contemplates the adultery of his wife Karin (Gertrud Fridh) with a man (Åke Fridell). When asked about his sentence, Alman tells Isak the same as always: Solitude.

After waking up, Borg tells Marianne that for some time he has been plagued by visions that announce that he is already dead. She, for her part, confesses that the same thing happens to her husband and tells him about a conversation between them. during which she confesses to Evald (Gunnar Björnstrand) that she is pregnant and that she wants to have him. Evald shows his displeasure and gives her the choice between him or her unborn son, because he was not a well-received child by his family either. After her story, Marianne tells her father-in-law that the reason she is returning home is because she wants to have her child and that she is not going to submit to Evald's demands.

The five travelers arrive at Evald's house in Lund and the next day they go to the celebration for the doctorate. That same night, the young people dedicate a song to the professor and after saying goodbye, they continue their journey to Italy. While sleeping, Borg is awakened by Evald and Marianne and decides to have a conversation with his son so that he can tell him what will happen to the marriage. Evald confesses that he cannot live without her and that he will submit to her will. The couple says goodbye to the old man to go out to dinner, while he has another dream in which Sara accompanies him to a lake where her father fishes and His mother is sitting, which makes the protagonist smile.

Distribution

Source: IMDb

Production

Origins

Ingmar Bergman had the idea for the film when he stopped in his hometown, Uppsala, during a trip from Stockholm to Dalarna. Upon arriving at his grandmother's house he imagined if he could open the door and find inside everything as it was during his childhood. The director himself would later comment:

It occurred to me: Could you make a film about this, that you walk really and that when you open a door you return to your childhood and that when you open another you return to reality and then turn into a corner of the street and reach another period of your existence? That was actually the idea behind Smultronstället.

However, in his autobiography Images: My Life in Film the filmmaker commented the following on his previous statement: «That is a lie. The truth is that I am always living in my childhood.

Development

Bergman wrote the script at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm – the film's protagonist's workplace – in the spring of 1957. The director remained in the hospital for two months undergoing treatment for his gastric problems and stress. His doctor was his friend Sture Helander, who invited him to attend his talks on psychosomatics and who was married to Gunnel Lindblom, who would play Carlota Borg (Isak's sister). At that time, Bergman's professional career was passing through a good time, as he was the artistic director of the main theater in the city of Malmö and was enjoying the success of his films Smiles of a Midsummer Night and The Seventh Seal. However, his personal life was in complete disarray, as his third marriage was going through a crisis, his romance with Bibi Andersson had deteriorated and his relationship with his parents, after an attempt at reconciliation with his mother, was on the decline.

The selection of the cast and the pre-production phase were very quick processes. The script was completed on May 31 and filming took place between July 2 and August 27, 1957. Filming of the summer house scenes took place in Saltsjöbaden, a tourist resort in the Stockholm archipelago, while the nightmare sequence was filmed in the city's old town, Gamla Stan; the rest of the film was filmed at the studios of the Swedish Film Institute, in Råsunda, just outside Stockholm.

Casting

The director's immediate choice for the main character was Victor Sjöström, one of his silent film idols and whom he had already directed in To Happiness eight years earlier. In the book Bergman on Bergman, the director indicated that he thought about Sjöström once the script was finished and that he asked producer Carl Anders Dymling to contact the actor. Later, in the book Images: My Life in Film, commented that the suggestion to hire Sjöström came from Dymling himself and he thought "long and hard before accepting."

During filming, the health of Sjöström, who was 77 years old at the time, was a cause of concern. Dymling had persuaded him to take on the role with the following words: "All you have to do is lie down under from a tree, eat wild strawberries and think about the past, so it's not too difficult. This comment was not correct, as the actor appeared in all but one of the film's scenes. Initially, Sjöström had trouble with his lines, something that frustrated and enraged him, leading him to step away in a moment. corner and banging her head against the wall until she bruised herself. To vent her revered mentor, Bergman made a pact with co-star Ingrid Thulin that if anything went wrong in a sequence, she would take responsibility herself. Things got better. when filming schedules were changed so that the veteran actor could get home in time for his five p.m. whiskey.

As usual, Bergman chose for his team actors and technicians with whom he had previously worked in film or theater. Bibi Andersson plays the double role of Sara, the protagonist's childhood love and a young woman full of energy who reminds him of his lost love. Andersson, 21 years old and who was in a relationship with the director at the time, had appeared in supporting roles in Smiles of a Midsummer Night and The Seventh Seal, and would later be the protagonist of Persona. For her part, Ingrid Thulin, who took on the role of Marianne, Borg's daughter-in-law, would later participate in other feature films by the director such as The Face, The Communicants or Screams and Whispers. Bergman's first wife, Else Fisher, made a brief uncredited appearance as Borg's mother in the final flashback and his daughter Lena played one of the protagonist's twin sisters.

Reception

Critic and public response

Smultronstället was well received by critics. On the Rotten Tomatoes website the film has a 95% acceptance rate, with a total of forty comments and an average rating of 8.9/10. On the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) with a score of 8.3/10 given by the public - 49,586 voters -, it is ranked 132 in the top 250, while on FilmAffinity, it has a rating of 8.1/10, based on the votes of more than 15,000 users.

Derek Malcolm, film critic for The Guardian, highlighted that "what makes the film great is its closeness to each of us and its almost Christian insistence on the possibility of reconciliation and redemption" and commented that "it has a compassionate view of life that illustrates Bergman's more optimistic side." Bosley Crowther of The New York Times highlighted the performances of Thulin and Andersson, but noted that " It's so deeply disconcerting that I wonder if Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say." For his part, Hal Erickson of Allmovie called it one of the Swedish filmmaker's most accessible films and one of the "most accessible" European films. influential of his generation." Chuck Bowen of Slant Magazine wrote that in the ending "you don't expect a conventional emotional catharsis, since that would violate Borg's (and Bergman's) sad meaning of life" and that "reflects Borg's provisional willingness to communicate and ask, without excuse or apology, for unconditional love and forgiveness. And that simple request, in one of the most moving moments in all of cinema, is finally granted by Sara's doppelgänger. Antonio Albert of the newspaper El País commented that The director "takes advantage of the journey of his protagonist to drag us with him on the long, beautiful and lucid journey through life, fears, faith, family and everything that makes up an existence that rushes towards death with the consequent stir of the uneasy soul." Tom Dawson of the BBC praised "Gunnar Fischer's masterful cinematography and Sjöström's moving performance" and remarked that "it emerges as one of the Swedish director's most elegiac and human films."

Legacy

Over the years, the film's reputation has grown. In a 2002 survey bySight & Sound, directors Ken Loach and Jaco Van Dormael placed it in their top 10 of the best feature films. For their part, the tabloid The Village Voice placed it among the 250 best feature films of the XX century. In an interview in 1963, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick mentioned that Smultronstället was his second favorite film, while Federico Fellini claimed in another interview, that same year, that it was the only Bergman film he had seen and that it was enough for him to understand what a great artist he was. The film served as an influence for Woody Allen's Another Woman and Deconstructing Harry. For his part, Steven Jay Schneider included it in his book of the 1001 Movies What you have to see before you die.

In 1995, on the occasion of the centenary of the invention of cinema, the Vatican established a list of the best forty-five films. Smultronstället was one of those included for "one man's inner journey from the pain of regret and anxiety, to a refreshing sense of peace and reconciliation."

Awards and nominations

Smultronstället received several prestigious film awards. In 1958 it won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin International Film Festival. That same year, the film also won a Pasinetti award at the Venice Film Festival. The following year it received nominations for best film. and best foreign actor for Sjöström at the BAFTA awards, two awards at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival for best feature film and best actor and a Bodil award for best European film. In 1960, he won a Globe Honorary gold for best foreign film and earned an Oscar nomination in the best original screenplay category.