Wild Strawberries

The year 2026 marks the centenary of the birth of Ingrid Thulin, who plays Marianne in Wild Strawberries: the one person who tells Isak Borg the truth to his face, and the mirror in which the old man is forced to look at himself. Here Bergman set past and present within a single frame, without drawing a line between them, and raised a question: when the road of a life runs only one way, how can the past be made good? The film received the Golden Bear and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and the Pasinetti Award at Venice in 1958, won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 1960, and was nominated for the Academy Award for best screenplay written directly for the screen.

1. The Story of One Day and One Lifetime

Isak Borg, a retired physician and bacteriologist of seventy eight, sets out one summer morning from Stockholm for Lund, where, fifty years after taking his doctorate, he is to receive the honorary title of Doctor Jubilaris. His daughter-in-law Marianne, separated from his son and pregnant, travels with him. A road that should take a few hours turns slowly into a journey across the whole of Isak's life, as though a man were looking at his entire existence in the course of a single day.

The film opens with a nightmare: an empty street, a clock without hands, a man who turns to reveal that he has no face, and a horseless carriage whose wheel catches on a lamppost, spilling a coffin onto the pavement. A hand reaches out of the coffin, and when Isak bends down he sees that the dead man lying inside is himself. In those first minutes Bergman lays out the entire film before us: time, death, solitude, and a man compelled to return to his own life before death arrives.

Then the journey begins. On the way, Isak stops at the summer house of his childhood. Bergman uses none of the usual signals for entering the past. He draws no clear border between dream and reality and gives the viewer no time to prepare. The old man stands beside the strawberry bushes and suddenly, within the same frame, the past comes alive. It is now 1907, and Sara, the young cousin whom Isak loved and who later married his brother, is picking wild strawberries.

Isak is present in the scene, but no one sees him. He has not returned to the past; he has become an invisible witness to his own lost life. The past is unreachable, not only because it is over, but because the one person who still sees it has grown old.

Soon three young hitchhikers climb into the car. The girl among them is also called Sara, and Bibi Andersson, who plays the Sara of the past, plays her too. One is a love that was lost, the other a fresh possibility of living: a face returning from the past, this time bringing not regret but energy and movement.

Next a middle-aged couple joins them, a husband and wife who humiliate each other so mercilessly that Marianne is obliged to ask them to get out. Every incident on the road opens a door onto Isak's past or his future: a mother still alive but frozen, who has kept a box filled with the toys of her ten children and still knows to whom each of them belonged; the memory of a wife who betrayed him; and a son who, like his father, has become cold and withdrawn and does not want a child brought into the world.

In that same box lies Isak's father's gold pocket watch. His mother intends to give it to Sigfrid's eldest son, the very infant whom, fifty years earlier, in the summer that Sara left Isak, Sara used to carry about and sing to, and who is now turning fifty. Isak takes the watch and sees that it has no hands: the same handless watch from the previous night's nightmare. Three strands of the film knot themselves into a single object: death, Sara, and time that has stopped working. It is as if the arrest of time and the inability to live were an inheritance passed down in this family from one generation to the next.

The film reaches its peak in Isak's second nightmare. He is taken to an examination room and asked to read what is written on the blackboard. He cannot. The examiner reads it for him: "A doctor's first duty is to ask forgiveness."

Then the verdict is delivered: "You are guilty of guilt."

And the sentence is nothing other than loneliness.

Yet Wild Strawberries is not a film of punishment. At the end Bergman opens another way. The three young people sing to the old man beneath his window and take their leave. Marianne has decided to keep her child and to go back and save her marriage. Isak too, perhaps for the first time, tries to speak to others, to show affection, to close a little of the distance he has spent years constructing.

That night, before sleep, a last image comes to him. Sara leads him through his childhood memories down to the water. His parents are sitting on the far shore; his father is fishing and his mother waves to him. Isak smiles, and in the final shot his face is at peace.

The past cannot be undone, but it can be reconciled with. It is this small possibility of reconciliation that saves the film from despair.

The original Swedish title, Smultronstället, literally means the place of the wild strawberries, but in Swedish it is an idiom for a small, hidden, personal spot that holds an emotional value for someone, a place others may not even know exists. From the very first word, then, the film's title is not about fruit. It is about personal memory, and about the place in which a person has hidden his own past.

2. A Film Rooted in Bergman's Real Life

For years Bergman told the story that the idea came to him on the road. Driving from Stockholm to Dalarna, he stopped in Uppsala and passed his grandmother's house. Standing there, he imagined what would happen if he could open the door and find everything exactly as it had been in his childhood: if a person could open a door and walk into another period of his own life, and turn a corner and suddenly find himself in another time.

Years later, in Images: My Life in Film, Bergman withdrew his own account and wrote: "That's a lie. The truth is that I am forever living in my childhood."

The screenplay was written in the spring of 1957 in the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, the same hospital with which Isak Borg is connected in the story. Bergman spent close to two months there, treated for recurring stomach trouble and nervous exhaustion. The final screenplay is dated 31 May 1957, and shooting ran from 2 July to 27 August of the same year.

He was at that moment in one of the most brilliant periods of his working life. Smiles of a Summer Night had been made in 1955, and The Seventh Seal was released in that same year, 1957. His private life, however, was falling apart: his third marriage was ending, his relationship with Bibi Andersson was drawing to a close, and his relations with his parents had reached one of their bitterest phases. Wild Strawberries came out of exactly this contradiction, a film made at the height of professional success and in the middle of personal collapse.

Casting Victor Sjöström as Isak was the key to the film. Sjöström was one of the towering figures of Swedish silent cinema, the idol of Bergman's youth and one of his earliest supporters at Svensk Filmindustri. He was seventy seven during the shoot and turned seventy eight a few months later. He was tired, unwell and misanthropic, and at first had no wish to take the part.

Carl Anders Dymling, the film's producer, talked him into it with the words: "There is nothing to it. You just lie under a tree, eat wild strawberries and think about your past."

The truth was precisely the reverse. Almost the entire weight of the film rested on Sjöström, who appears in every scene but one.

The first days of shooting were hard. Sjöström would forget his lines, lose his temper, and in his frustration go off to a corner and beat his head against the wall. Bergman made a pact with Ingrid Thulin that if a take went wrong she would take the blame herself, so that Sjöström would not feel humiliated in front of the others.

In the end the schedule was rearranged so that he could be home by five in the afternoon for his customary whisky. From then on the work went better. What remains on screen is not the performance of a tired old man but one of the greatest images of old age in the history of cinema: a man at once proud, vulnerable, frightened, and longing to be forgiven.

Wild Strawberries was Victor Sjöström's last appearance before a camera.

That sentence should be read in its full sense. One day after the film's premiere, Sjöström was taken to a hospital in Stockholm with heart trouble. His condition worsened through 1959; in December he was hospitalised again, and three weeks later, on the evening of 3 January 1960, he died of a blood clot. He was eighty.

At the memorial ceremony held by the Swedish Film Academy on 20 February 1960, Bergman read aloud from the diary he had kept during the making of Wild Strawberries. A film about an old man looking back at the end of his road became, in fact, its leading actor's farewell to cinema, and Bergman was the first to say so aloud.

The film also carries clear links to Sjöström's own place in film history. The horseless carriage of the opening nightmare inevitably recalls The Phantom Carriage, Sjöström's celebrated 1921 film, which Bergman loved and had watched many times.

The cinematographer of Wild Strawberries is Gunnar Fischer, not Sven Nykvist. The living summer light of the childhood scenes and the harsh whiteness of the day are Fischer's work, set in complete opposition to the blackness, violence and emptiness of the nightmares.

Bibi Andersson, twenty one at the time of filming, plays both Saras: Isak's lost love and the young woman who crosses his path in the present. Max von Sydow appears briefly as a filling station attendant who still remembers the kindnesses of the old doctor.

As for that Oscar nomination: contrary to what is sometimes said, Bergman could not have the recorded nomination struck from the Academy's list. After it was announced he wrote a sharp letter to the Academy asking to be spared the attention of its juries in future, considering the Oscar a humiliating institution for the art of cinema. Despite his protest, his name still stands in the official list of 1960 nominees.

The film was not received the same way everywhere. Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times in 1959, found it so mystifying that he wondered whether Bergman himself knew what he wanted to say, though he also noted that the English subtitles of the print screened were poor.

On the other side, Stanley Kubrick, in a 1963 interview, named Wild Strawberries his second favourite film, and Andrei Tarkovsky placed it among his ten best. Satyajit Ray drew on its structure of journey, memory and dream in Nayak, and Woody Allen returned to it repeatedly, from Stardust Memories and Another Woman to Crimes and Misdemeanors and Deconstructing Harry.

Yet the film's real influence cannot be summed up in a list of prizes or of the works it inspired. In Wild Strawberries Bergman showed that a journey into the past is not necessarily made to discover some new truth. Sometimes a person has known everything all along. It simply takes a lifetime to find the courage to look at it.

Watch: The film is available on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max. Public library card holders can watch it free through Kanopy.