Wild Strawberries By Ingmar Bergman

Recalling that strawberries served with milk in a bowl as a good traditional dish in the western world, one may want to know how that figured in the film Wild Strawberries in Bergman’s 1957 classic with Bibi Anderson and the emerging Max Von Sydow. It must have held some symbolic power. In fact when one sees Bibi collecting them to give to her admirer only to lose them abruptly one sees the poetic force behind the symbolic gesture of collecting the fruit in the appreciation of traditional love and then losing it for a more lustful relationship.

When time stops in a sense, perhaps it is an allusion to impending death and that is what one might expect in a film of Wild Strawberries with poetry of words and a marvelous use of the unspoken word between lines. A man caught up in the passing of his life reflects on how it could have been done better; it was a kind of revelation having him see himself, as he was younger, through his dreams. There were tender moment when he could have been more loving with his wife and others where he saw he own mortality and imminent death.

Parallels could be drawn between his failed love for his wife and the fact that he has overburdened his son with a debt. He calls the forte to give back the money as honorable before relapsing into a dream that asks him to look into a mirror and see that another suitor to a first love was more successful than he. The point was to show how cold and indifferent he was to that young lady while in reality he may have inherited the same iciness from his own mother.

Like mother like son, his daughter-in-law would report to him on their journey to Lund where he was to receive an honorable degree. By the way one can only surmise that he was in conflict with his own past demons having had to face his daughter -in-law’s accusations of being unloving, being unfair to his son.

Another grand moment of silence in a dream, at an earlier moment in the film which preludes the fact of the audience knowing about his unsentimental past towards his family. He finds himself locked in time on an abandoned street with no one in sight. What strikes his attention and is a metaphor for the timelessness of the moment is a clock on the street without any minute or hour