In 1982, Ingmar Bergman released a sprawling reflection on his life, Fanny and Alexander.  Intended to be his swan song, the five-part, 320-minute film examines the European cinema master through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve) as he experiences the triumphs and tragedies of growing up while also informing students of the director’s works about what helped to shape the foundational philosophies which would later be explored in some of the most important films ever made.  

The film opens with a brief prologue of Alexander in the vast Ekdahl home.  After growing bored of playing with his model theatre – possibly a production of The Magic Flute – he calls out to his family one by one, but there is no answer.  Seemingly alone, the statues begin to move, and the shadows answer the boy’s calls and Bergman lets us know that this will be a story rooted in reality, but he will push the narrative past its limit and allow for moments of divine intervention.   

After the prologue, the rest of Act One is an impressive, almost hour and a half long account of the Ekdahl Christmas party.  The warm glow of the candles against the red and green decorations is cozy and welcoming as we are invited to the family dinner.  There is toasting, jokes, and songs in between talks of love, desire, and prosperity.  Bergman makes us feel welcomed into part of his fictional family, here, as we learn who the various people are and start to uncover the web of relationships between them all. 

Of the most boisterous is Uncle Gustav (Jarl Kulle).  He gives off the attitude of being somewhat a menace, cracking jokes and chasing after Maj (Pernilla August), a young staff member at the Ekdahl home who has a soft spot in her heart for Alexander.  The boy feels jealous when he is put to bed by Maj and she mentions she will be spending the night with Gustav, but the film does not treat him like a true adversary.  Gustav is fiercely loyal to his family, despite his adultery, and will prove it time and time again in a really sweet and unexpected arc for his character that is framed to be a man-child interested only in his own self-gratification. 

Once in bed, Alexander finds it hard to sleep – maybe it is the excitement of Christmas, maybe it is his overactive imagination.  What follows during the children’s nighttime revelry is truly magical.  It starts with Alexander using his magic lantern to view a story, which, like the opening scene that finds him playing with a model theatre stage, continues to highlight the importance of storytelling for the boy.  It brings him closer to his parents who run a local theatre stage putting on the classics and nativity plays, but it also provides him an escape from his surroundings.  It is a theme seen repeated countless times in the reflections of directors as they highlight the importance of storytelling in their childhood, but few do it as tenderly and as dearly as Bergman does here. 

The lantern show is interrupted by their father, Oskar (Allan Edwall).  The apple clearly does not fall far from the tree, and we see where Alexander’s wild imagination comes from as Oskar tells the children the history of a nursery chair that he claims was once used by the emperor.  Edwall is a wonderful presence in the film and his care for the children comes through as he regales us with this tale of fantasy.  He is captivating and magnetic on the screen, and we cannot help but find ourselves swept away in his tale.  This joyous moment that helps close out Act One is a highlight of the film that is about to take a much darker turn. 

Act Two opens during a rehearsal of Hamlet, specifically the scene of the ghost warning Hamlet of the nefarious circumstances around his death.  Bergman is not shy with his allegories here, and while Alexander is not a clear 1:1 substitution for the Dane, there are enough similarities between the two.  During the rehearsal, Oskar suffers a stroke while delivering the “Brief let me be” soliloquy while Alexander watches from the auditorium.  The cast and crew all rush to his aid, but it does not prove to be enough.  The beloved man passes away after being returned to his home, surrounded by family in an impressively choreographed scene as Doctor Fürstenberg (Gste Prüzelius) attends to the ailing man.  Later that night, it is Emilie (Ewa Fröling) who awakes Alexander from his slumber with her screams.  Though while during Christmas, it was Alexander and the other children’s cries that woke Emilie, they were cries of joy. These are shrieks of grief that echo through the house which, while still elegantly decorated, feels empty, hollow, cold, and lifeless. 

With his father gone, Alexander’s mother finds a confidant in Bishop Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjö).  The supposed man of God could not be further in character from Oskar, and Alexander who has become spiteful of the God which took his father from him, needless to say, do not see eye to eye.  In Act Three, when Emilie moves her children into the home of the Bishop, it is here that those familiar with Bergman will find many of the themes he studies in his other films as Alexander begins to rebel more and more against religion. 

Act Three is the shortest of the memoir film, yet it packs a punch.  It splits its time between the bishop’s home where he and Alexander continuously spar as he enacts his punishments for the boy’s digressions and Helena Ekdahl’s (Gunn Wållgren) summer home.  One of the most unique things about Bergman’s script here is that he makes Alexander a bit of a brat, yet he never treats him as the smartest person in the room to the point where the audience is annoyed by him.  It is vital for the success of the film that we always remain on the side of Alexander, and Guve makes it very easy with his youthful innocence in this world that is determined to break him and his impressive naturalism in front of the camera.  The other interesting thing Bergman does here is that he drains every bit of color from the film when Alexander finds himself as a ward of the oppressive Bishop.  For all the warmth of the Ekdahl estate, the bishop’s palace is empty and cold, and the scenes appear almost in black and white.  The most color we see here is when Alexander is being punished after making up a story about seeing the ghost of the bishop’s first wife and children.  He is banished to the attic after a caning and while it is still dark and creepy, it is not the drab white stone that makes up the rest of the house. 

It is at the bishop’s house that Bergman’s themes of religion and his struggle with the difference between faith and morality come to the forefront.  As we previously saw during the funeral procession, Alexander has grown spiteful of the all-knowing, all-powerful God that took his father from him.  As he exits the church, he utters every foul word he knows in his own boyish attempt to show his displeasure with God.  Fanny, meanwhile, holds her hands in prayer.  One night during a violent thunderstorm there is a nearby lightning strike, to which Alexander remarks excitedly that maybe the Cathedral has been struck and will burn.  Fanny, in so far as she is able to being two years younger than her brother, scolds his comments to which he replies that if God “punishes a runt like me for so little, then he’s just the dirty bastard I [Alexander] suspect he is.”  Alexander, while not pious, is not a bad kid and by today’s standards would be medicated and sent back on his way for his overactive imagination, but he highlights a theme that is universal to us all that if there is a God, why does he punish good people?  This dynamic between the two siblings in these moments are reminiscent of conversations had between Karl Oskar and Kristina in Jan Troell’s The Emigrants / The New Land (1971, 1972), played by Bergman muses Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann who are both notably absent from Fanny & Alexander due to scheduling conflicts with other projects. 

As mentioned, Act Three splits its short time between two locations going so far as to denote “The Events of the Summer” as its own Act Four.  At Helena’s summer home, she meets with many of the characters we met in Act One at Christmas dinner.  It makes good on the relationship drama between Carl (Börje Ahlstedt) and his wife Lydia (Christina Schollin) in a really wonderful scene that continues to contextualize their failing romance introduced after the Christmas dinner.  But more importantly, it informs us that Emilie is pregnant with the bishop’s child, and she is scared and feels alone in a really heartbreaking conversation.  The Ekdahl family has not given up their allegiance to Oskar’s widow and they are united in their love and care not just for her, but for the children as well.  The entire summer house sequence plays out like a Chekov play with high drama all playing out to the delight of the audience. 

In the final act, Fanny and Alexander find themselves rescued by a friend of the family, Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson).  If there can be a complaint about the film, it is that not much happens on screen, and while it is true that these smaller-scale narratives often do not contain a lot of large scale action, the real fault here is that a lot happens off-screen and we rather see the effects play out. Regardless, the children escape and color returns again to the film as the siblings tentatively explore their hiding spot: a puppet theater.  Bergman creates some truly terrifying imagery here, not just with the inherent creepiness of walls covered in puppets so there are hundreds of eyes watching every move, but the overall tone is much darker even though the children are on their way to being reunited with the family.  He uses the puppets well with two notable examples of a mummy that turns its head to look at Alexander, and a second being a puppet of God that charges towards the boy before toppling over at his feet.  The real horror comes in the middle of the night when Alexander finds himself with Ishmael (Stina Ekbald) who recognizes the hate in the boy’s heart – the anger – and explains how these violent fantasies can be manifested into reality.  Bergman intercuts this strange séance with scenes back at the bishop’s palace where Emilie has found a lucky chance to poison the man with sleeping pills and make her own escape. 

Reunited at last, the epilogue is a joint christening celebration that bookends the film with the expansive Christmas dinner.  Emilie has carried the bishop’s child to term, as well as Maj who carried Gustav’s child, adding two new daughters to the family.  The film ends with Alexander resting his head on Helena’s lap as she reads through a script offered to her by Emilie as her grand return to the stage. 

The film asks a lot of young Guve who left acting after filming one other film with Bergman in 1984, After the Rehearsal.  He is incredibly emotive for the camera and his eyes are always telling the story of what he is feeling even when he is trying to hide it and appear brave.  A true natural actor giving one of the best child performances in cinema, he makes sure we as an audience never turn on Alexander even when he is misbehaving.  He finds the kernels of truth for his character in each scene as we navigate this cold and cruel world with him.  Juxtaposed with memories of the joyous moments of Act One, Guve makes sure that Alexander never loses hope despite the oppressive conditions imposed on him, and that determination and optimism is infectious as we watch the trails play out on screen.  

Fanny and Alexander is an iconic work in Bergman’s career of which there are so many, but it stands out as being his most personal film by far given its self-reflective nature.  Lovingly watched over by Oskar after his passing, it touches on the supernatural and never makes it clear if these visitations are real or figments of Alexander’s imagination, but they are comforting all in the same.  Bergman often finds his work quickly written off as being overwrought with metaphor and high concepts given the existential themes and while those elements are all present in Fanny and Alexander, it remains a highly accessible work even despite its runtime.  There is something for everyone in this genre-spanning piece structured like a modern mini-series as it volleys between being a costume drama, philosophical work, family drama, and downright horror, yet it never loses the warmth or care for the two young leads and the result is an endlessly rewatchable coming of age film from one of the world’s finest craftsmen behind the camera.