#56: Wild Strawberries

Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)

This is a film I hadn't seen since I was a teenager and had different expectations from movies, so I might as well have never seen it. Wild Strawberries might be in the top ten of all time in terms of pscyhological character development. The film opens with the very famous dream sequence where the man sees the clock with no hands and himself in a coffin. He's a man in his seventies being honored for a lifetime of academic achievement, and his mortality is hitting him in the face all at once. He looks back and sees his life in a whole different light. He drove everybody close to him away by keeping a cold, rational distance from everyone to suit his intellectual pride. He judges himself and makes a new effort to connect to the people in his life. There isn't really much more to say about it than that without getting into a deeper scene by scene analysis of the imagery and dialog, because despite the nuanced character development, Wild Strawberries is a very simple film. Bergman doing what Bergman does best.

Rating: **** 1/2 / 5

51/101

Others:

Dogville ** / 5

I like the concept of this film more than I like the actual film. The set looks like the set of a high school play. It's a big flat black board with props drawn in chalk on the ground. The problem is, the plot is like a high school play except R rated, and it's so long (Almost three hours) it can be hard to get through. A woman on the run from the mob comes upon a small mountain town called Dogville and is helped by one of it's people who enlists the rest of the town to help her. She helps them out and gains their trust. But after they realize it's dangerous to keep her and she has nowhere else to go, their ugliness starts to come out. They start to feel more and more entitled to take whatever they want from her, to the point they treat her like a slave or an animal. Then at the end, after you see this poor girl being exploited for three hours, through her moralizing she turns out to be just as depraved and barbaric as the townsfolk. Again, a wonderful concept for a movie. But it's just too long to be so simple and very boring to sit through.