Wild Strawberries (1957)

Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) concerns an elderly bacteriologist named Isak Borg who drives from Stockholm to Lund to collect an honorary degree, and who spends the journey being ambushed by his own memories. There are dreams, a childhood sweetheart, a pair of feuding spouses ejected from the car, and a great deal of quiet Scandinavian regret. Victor Sjöström plays the old man with the weariness of someone who has genuinely earned it, and the picture remains a landmark of mid-century European art cinema. It also presents our current classification apparatus with almost nothing to work on, which is its own kind of respite.

We searched the film diligently for the signifiers of contemporary social consciousness and came away empty. The cast is uniformly Swedish and uniformly pale. Marianne and Sara are drawn with real interiority, yet the film has no interest in patriarchy as a system to be indicted. Race never surfaces as a subject, nor does the environment, nor the politics of wealth. Borg's failings are emotional and personal: coldness, vanity, an inability to love. Bergman locates the problem inside one man's soul, not inside an economic order, and he declines to lecture. The final dream of a lakeside picnic offers reconciliation, not instruction.

This leaves the ledger blank across every column we maintain. That is not a criticism of the film. A 1957 Swedish meditation on mortality was never going to traffic in the cultural vocabulary of the 2020s, and demanding that it do so would be an act of critical vandalism. We record the zeroes and move on, chastened, mildly bored, and quietly admiring the strawberries.