FANNY & ALEXANDER

I'm a sucker for well-told (in order) ghost stories, sprawling family dramas and coming-of-age stories, so there were three reasons going in for me to be predisposed to like F&A. I've seen a half-dozen or so Bergman films-- the most famous ones-- and knowing in advance of F&A's somewhat more conventional subject matter, I was curious to see how he would marry his unmistakable emotional intensity (there are no moments of respite in a Bergman film) with the stuff of relative narrative leisure. I think it's effective. Yes, it's clearly the work of an artist who is looking at the end of his career and life, and it bears some popular touches, but it still has Bergman's sensibilities and echoes of themes that run through his other work.

His portrayal of the Ekdahl family-- warm, caring, eccentric, wealthy and artistic-- is a composite of well-drawn characters, the adults moreso than the children (other than Alexander). The matriarch never sleeps. Her three sons are distinctly individual. Gustav Adolph is business-minded but warm-hearted enough that his wife and mother don't object to his using the maidstaff as his personal harem. Carl is an academic of mixed success who loathes himself and his German wife and has borrowed and spent himself near destitution. Oscar is the manager of the local theater, which he has run profitably with the help of his mother's patronage and his actor wife's performances. The characters (with the exception of Alexander and, perhaps, Emilie) don't change significantly over the course of the film. Rather, the dramatic emphasis is directed toward how the diverse members of the family complement each other in dealing with common tragedy.

As always, God and His vicars are not a source of comfort. Elsewhere in Bergman, God is cruelly silent, or a spider in a deluded vision, or an unpersuasive source of temporary comfort. Here, He's a "shit" and merely a prank with a puppet to scare a child. The search for God is never irrelevant, though, and by introducing ghosts and Ishmael's act of firestarting, there's a supernatural element undergirding the lives and events of the characters. We cannot know if God exists in this world, but the spirits of the characters loom larger than life and beyond the grave. As always, whether that brings consolation or terror depends on the spirit.

I've yet to see a clergyman in a Scandinavian film who made the faith look better, and I don't suppose, say, von Trier will be giving me one anytime soon. Edvard the Bishop is in many ways the culmination of Bergman's other pastors, beginning with his own father, but despite the fact that his first appearance telegraphs that he'll be the film's antagonist, there were a few moments when I thought his character displayed a complexity or sensitivity or self-awareness that went far beyond the stock Stern Clergyman character.

The film's extended reference to Hamlet is done effectively and poignantly. Emilie, of course, protests too much when she tells Alexander explicitly that she's not the Queen, nor the Bishop the false King. No, she's not inconstant like Gertrude, but her misjudgment regarding the Bishop's character imperils her and her family.

Still, despite his real pain and cruel mistreatment at the Bishop's hands, there's something about Alexander's predisposition to regard God as indifferent to him that's a bit untoward. There weren't many children in Alexander's day who were living as opulently as he. It's all he knows, though, and I appreciate his warm heart, his loyalty to his mother and sister and his quirky sense of humor, including that streak of Tourette's that brings the scatalogical to his mouth so readily and unexpectedly.

Of course, while the family has been restored in the end, there are still the rumblings of future conflicts, and I appreciate the way in which Bergman resists a singularly happy ending (which we might have got if the film had ended at the christening banquet). Gustav Adolph, while a benevolent and loving father, has some of the same tendencies to control those in his household that Edvard did. And the ghosts will always rattle around, for good and ill.