'Wild Strawberries'

Like other of Ingmar Bergman's movies, Wild Strawberrries militates for crediting the man with a gift. Here, certainly, as in a fine novel, he has portrayed successfully what others can barely talk about happily.

Janus Films' latest import, which opened at the Exeter on Sunday, cannot help but enhance Bergman's reputation. It is a fine film, beautifully acted, with a superb scenario that develops into several sequences of unforgettable camerawork.

"Strawberries" runs through elderly Professor Isak Borg's one-day motor trip to receive an honorary degree at a Swedish university, and through old age's dreams of youth and death. Between self-revealing dream sequences, Borg is busy talking to his bitterly perceptive daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin), arguing and making-up with his stout-hearted housekeeper (Julan Kindahl), and experiencing three impossibly youthful hitch-hikers and an actress-and-husband couple whom he has picked up on the road to the university.

As professor Borg, Victor Sjostrom has emerged into some glowing Indian summer acting; his portrayal is effortless yet sustained and deep-cutting.

The professor, who has for many years been a very eminent doctor, dreams of confrontations with the people he has left for dead; and he keynotes the film with the statement that "in our relations with other people, we mainly criticize them."

Sjostrom has been criticized for not emphasizing the "heartless coldness" that Borg's daughter-in-law alleges to exist in him. However, while she is a compelling inquisitor, the daughter-in-law is an impassioned--and perhaps obtuse--observer, who need not be believed. Bergman's direction of Sjostrom seemed quite valid in every respect.

Miss Thulin plays the daughter-in-law role well, but seems to have been pushed a bit too hard by the director. The supporting parts are well acted.

The only second-thoughts that come to mind about Wild Strawberries is that, in the Bergman context, it is a suspension movie without theme-and-motion unity, and that the acting, good as it is, might conceivably be set down as "support only" for Bergman's subtly undevised devices.