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FANNY AND ALEXANDER
1983
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Starring
Pernilla Allwin
Bertil Guve
Jan Malmsjö
Börje Ahlstedt
Anna Bergman
Gunn Wållgren
Kristina Adolphson
Erland Josephson
Mats Bergman
Jarl Kulle
Runtime
312 min.
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Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden. Ingmar Bergman intended FANNY AND ALEXANDER as his swan song, and it is the director's warmest and most autobiographical film, an overflowing masterwork that combines his trademark melancholy and emotional intensity with immense joy and sensuality. Bergman described it as "the sum total of my life as a filmmaker." And in this, the full-length version of his triumphant valediction, his vision is expressed at its fullest.
It's hard to think about the films of Ingmar Bergman in the wake of something so tremendously humanistic and so irrepressibly joyful, despite horror both realistic and fantastic strewn among the emotional and physical landscape, as FANNY AND ALEXANDER. The ghosts that hide, shake, and scream out in PERSONA and HOUR OF THE WOLF, the ink-black blood relations of THE SILENCE and THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, even the cherubic perversions of SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT don't so much burn or wash away, but rather seem like snapshots from what would become the film of Bergman's life. For in this case, we are, to be perfectly frank, speaking of one of the towering visions of cinema, one of those masterpieces that plainly presents itself as a work that transcends even the long career of a great artist.
Perched somewhere between where children take on the attributes of adults and adults adopt the cruel and delirious practices of children, between where imagination becomes a weapon of the mind and a force capable of birthing physical creations of the most extravagant kind, is where encounter FANNY AND ALEXANDER. As childhood films and memory films go, it is likely the best of either ever made. It's also, however, a devastatingly powerful visual treatise on the art of storytelling, and on influence for that matter. Indeed, FANNY AND ALEXANDER is the final word of Bergman's career, a plea to indulge fantasy with direction and a heartbreakingly sincere farewell to life in all its real horrors and constant surprises—a chisel taken to his own blank tombstone and the last deep roar of expression from a great artist.
(Chris Cabin)
It's hard to think about the films of Ingmar Bergman in the wake of something so tremendously humanistic and so irrepressibly joyful, despite horror both realistic and fantastic strewn among the emotional and physical landscape, as FANNY AND ALEXANDER. The ghosts that hide, shake, and scream out in PERSONA and HOUR OF THE WOLF, the ink-black blood relations of THE SILENCE and THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, even the cherubic perversions of SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT don't so much burn or wash away, but rather seem like snapshots from what would become the film of Bergman's life. For in this case, we are, to be perfectly frank, speaking of one of the towering visions of cinema, one of those masterpieces that plainly presents itself as a work that transcends even the long career of a great artist.
Perched somewhere between where children take on the attributes of adults and adults adopt the cruel and delirious practices of children, between where imagination becomes a weapon of the mind and a force capable of birthing physical creations of the most extravagant kind, is where encounter FANNY AND ALEXANDER. As childhood films and memory films go, it is likely the best of either ever made. It's also, however, a devastatingly powerful visual treatise on the art of storytelling, and on influence for that matter. Indeed, FANNY AND ALEXANDER is the final word of Bergman's career, a plea to indulge fantasy with direction and a heartbreakingly sincere farewell to life in all its real horrors and constant surprises—a chisel taken to his own blank tombstone and the last deep roar of expression from a great artist.
(Chris Cabin)