Ingmar Berman's Wild Strawberries:

Glimpses of the past through reveries

By Dilshan Boange

'Wild Strawberries' is one of Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman's films which deal with tender emotions and deals with questions of life and death, self discovery and re-evaluating the worth of life in retrospect.

A film written and directed by the Swedish master film-maker Wild Strawberries is set on the principal premise of an aging professor recalling his past. It is a tale of how human existence can be understood in connection with nostalgia for the past.

The central character Prof. Isak Borg is a widowed 78-year-old physician who specialised in bacteriology. The story begins as he sets out on a long car ride from Stockholm to Lund to be awarded the degree of Doctor Jubilaris 50 years after he received his doctorate from Lund University.

He is accompanied by his pregnant daughter-in-law Marianne and is contemplating a legal separation to separate from her husband, Evald, Isak's only son.

Nightmares

During the trip, we see how the professor is agonised by nightmares and daydreams which depict old age and impending death to re-evaluate his life.

He encounters sets of hitchhikers, and each group causes a memory to be sprung up which leads the professor off to reveries into his troubled past.

The first set consists of two young men and a woman named Sara. Sara is somewhat a symbolic figure for Isak's boyhood love, who is incidentally played by the same actress.

Next the professor and Marianne pick up an embittered middle-aged couple whose vehicle nearly collides with theirs.

The pair become intolerable with their bickering and Marianne stops the car and demands that they leave. The couple thus becomes a symbol that reminds the professor of his own unhappy marriage.

There are reminiscences of the protagonist about his childhood and his sweetheart Sara, with whom he remembered gathering wild strawberries.

Sara did however did not marry Isak, instead married his older brother. The professor and Marianne stop to visit Isak's aged mother who is very aloof and solitary. He begins to see certain traits of his mother in himself.

And slowly he begins to accept himself, his past, his present and the inevitable death that grows closer with old age.

Destination

The professor finally arrives at his destination and is awarded the degree of Doctor Jubilaris.

However, by then the professor realises the futility of amassing accolades and honours.

We are finally shown how after returning home and going to bed that night the professor dreams of a family picnic by a lake.

The story thus speaks optimistically of how the aging professor gains closure about realising what he found true peace and joy in.

The story thus moves beautifully between reality and reveries and weaves a man's path of discerning what really matter in life and how the past can be a source of joy and comfort as old age advances.

'Wild Strawberries' is a story that speaks of the power of human memory and reminiscences as a spiritual and psychological premise which moulds the beauty of the past as a story that we wish to silently retell ourselves.

Scenes from the film