Hutch’s review published on Letterboxd:
Fanny and Alexander is one of the great films about childhood, and yet it is so much more than that. In many ways it stands as Ingmar Bergman’s swan song, capping his impressive body of work with a glorious coda. He returns to many of the themes he examined over the course of his career, and yet here he locates them in a new and more optimistic light. That is not to say that Fanny and Alexander is a sunny film - it is actually very dark at times - but where it differs from his previous films is that it is told, at least in part, through a child’s perspective, and this frees it up for fantasy in a way his other films do not. Many of those others emphasised collapse, from positions of relative stability, towards spiritual, emotional and physical anguish, and so it does here too, except that in Fanny and Alexander it’s the spark of imagination that keeps hopes alive. For all his films that point to the absence of God, or the failure of love, this one locates magic in the act of imagination, as experienced through the child’s perspective, as well as through theatre and storytelling. In doing so it shows how curiosity and dreams, if given the air to breathe, can provide solace, meaning and direction to life, even when things take a turn for the worse.
Fanny and Alexander spans five acts, which are bookended by a prologue and an epilogue. In total it lasts more than five hours, but it never once lags or outstays its welcome. Instead it gracefully builds upon itself, giving full voice to its large ensemble of outstanding actors working with a wonderfully fluent and nuanced script.
Theatre threads a line through each section of the story. In the intimate prologue, where we are introduced to 10 year-old Alexander, he is seen peering into a toy theatre, as if he were a kind of God. It is a beautiful image that brings us up close to the wonder of his imagination, with all the possibilities of a blank stage awaiting him. Act One then commences in full celebration of the theatre at a performance of a festive end of year show. It is followed by a lavish party held in honour of the troupe. The scenes that follow introduce us to Alexander’s immediate and extended family. The scenes show a predominantly happy house, bathed in rich and warm colours despite the mid-winter chill. The characters are drawn fondly, yet sharply, with all their tensions and their fancies, and yet for all the joy on show, it hints at the clouds already threatening to reveal their shadow.
Act Two starts with comedy in the form of tragedy during a rehearsal of Hamlet. We are shown the scene between Hamlet and his father’s ghost being played before a disinterested cast and crew who are mucking around in the wings. I have never seen Hamlet played so much like a comedy before, but the humour turns on a dime, becoming genuine tragedy when the children’s father, playing the ghost, suddenly collapses. His death follows fast and with it the fortunes of Alexander’s family, including his little sister Fanny, and his young mother, Emilie. The children are like terrified bystanders watching with wide, uncomprehending eyes, at the sudden fragility of adult lives. They watch their grandmother’s grief and their mother’s screams, and yet things are about to get much worse.
Act Three again begins with the theatre, but this time it is the Fool’s song from Twelfth Night, and here the comedy feels distinctly like tragedy: “for the rain it raineth every day … our play is done”. And so it seems, with the children’s mother marrying the local bishop and unwittingly committing herself and them to a life of austerity, sacrifice and spiritual impoverishment all in the name of a cruel God. Alexander becomes like Hamlet, frequently seeing his father’s ghost, and wishing his step-father dead. His mother, meanwhile, becomes a tragic figure, stricken first by grief and then by the realisation that the love and social salvation she sought with the Bishop is instead a living hell. She abandons her role managing the theatre, along with her possessions, and begins to collapse into sickness and misery.
There is no place for the stage in Act Four, as the Bishop has banished such frivolity, and yet this Act provides the film’s dramatic gut punch, with him aiming his cruel authority directly at poor Alexander, seeking to snuff out his imagination and destroy the young boy's spirit. The Bishop’s home is like a barren Elsinore and is full of cold and domineering women, with the Bishop as their patriarch; and this places Alexander in direct competition with him as the man of the house. But there is no real contest and poor Alexander is left with nothing but plucky defiance in the face of beatings and humiliation, and threats of eternal damnation. Alexander’s defiance does, however, manage to shield his imagination, and this is the only thing the Bishop cannot directly deny.
Act Five is breath-taking. It is as if we enter the magic of the theatre itself, stepping outside the realities of the earlier scenes and entering an imaginary world as if in a dream. The trancelike rhythm flows within a masterclass of parallel storytelling that takes flight in unexpected ways, including strange and supernatural elements, which build to rich and at times horrifying effect, and result in a deeply satisfying climax.
The Epilogue then reunites the family and reforms the theatre troupe, and the family’s happiness returns, although this time not without lingering shadows. The film then ends with a line from August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, which for me is the key to the film:
“Against a faint background of reality, imagination spins out and weaves new patterns”
It suggests imagination can transcend reality, not only providing escape from it, but also helping transform it into something more beautiful and rewarding. Fanny and Alexander is Bergman’s Dream Play. It feels like he is allowing himself to celebrate the richness of his creative life, despite all the hardships he has had to endure. Bergman presents imagination as an act of defiance and an act of creation, shaking a fist at the cruelty of God and using it to subvert rather than submit to authority.
I think it’s this tension between the warmth of theatre and the chill of reality that drives the film. The realities are shown to diminish people, but the imagination, which is given full voice through theatre, stories and dreams, provides a way of dealing with it all. It’s a privileged view for sure, but one that my middle-class sensibilities can embrace. Life for me is about family, food and wine, the arts and beauty. The decline of age, societal expectations and the stresses of work impoverish my life, but my parallel life of imagination counteracts these losses.
Fanny and Alexander is one of my favourite films. It is a heavyweight drama, which manages to feel both lean and rich, epic and intimate, and deeply moving without ever being sentimental. It has the space and patience of an old man’s reflections, but they are profound and not nostalgic. There are no rose-tinted glasses, only acute observations about the theatre of life, and the life of the theatre. The film stands as one of the great films about children, but even more so as a wonderful tribute to imagination through art, and its capacity to do more than merely imitate life, but to actually make it worth living.
