Tapestries of the Spirit

IN FANNY AND ALEXANDER, veteran director Ingmar Bergman creates such a world as only a child could see. Ten-year-old Alexander, the narrator of Bergman's latest and purportedly last work, lives in a "little" world where his imagination makes fantasy merge with reality. In this richly woven dream world, proportions are distorted, colors take on an added significance, and magic transforms the relationships between people.

Though events pour by in an extravagant rush, the plot in fact centers on Alexander (Bertil Guve) and his sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin), as they adjust to their father's death and their mother's quick remarriage to a tyrannical bishop Guve's huge brown eyes watch everything silently, building a mask to ward off the collapse of his world. Through Alexander we watch the movements of the rest of his family, particularly his grandmother (Guna Waugrea), who embodies the wisdom and vision of a true matriarch. An aging actress, she controls her family and tries to face her own mortality and loss of physical strength.

The film resembles an intricately stitched tapestry, every new layer and angle reveals more about the lives of three generations of the Ekdahl family. And as every strand in a tapestry contributes to the overall scene, every character in the immense family structure retains his individually but it is subsumed in an intricate picture. The mystical force of the theater binds all the members of the clan together in a world of illusion.

Focusing on one family occasion after another--Christmas, the death of a son, the wedding of the widowed daughter-in-law, and the birth of two babies--Bergman's lens breaks down large group scenes into intimate individual conversations. Laced throughout magnificently decorated scenes and richly furnished rooms in the grandmother's house are snow-covered streets and the racing torrents of a stream; in contrast with such plushness, the mundane home settings seem stark, cold, and isolated.

FOR THREE and a half hours. Bergman maintains a seamless child's-eye view. Wishes come true and statues turn into people; everything seems simplistic, but beneath the surface a myriad of half-truths exists. Safe within their highly dramatic world, the characters lead sensual lives controlled by goods, ornaments, and sex.

Alexander's attempt to withstand his restraints placed on him by his stereotypically devilish stepfather (Jan Malmsio) is vividly etched as the Bishop beats him while trying to defeat his rebelliousness. Throughout his trials to escape his stepfather. Alexander is visited--or rather haunted--by the ghost of his father--who, ironically enough, died while paying Hamlet's father. But Alexander never becomes Hamlet and his mother never truly becomes the deluded Gertrude. Instead, Alexander withstands his father's appearance, and his mother fights for her own escape. Through the semi-occult figure of Grandmother Helena's former lover, the grizzeled Jew Isak (Erland Josephson), the escape proceeds and the magic becomes more pronounced.

Full of humor and terror as well as pomp and circumstance, Fanny and Alexander in the end becomes a portrayal of adolescence--a time when a ragged teddy bear can no longer offer any solace. Fanny's small yet important role emphasizes the portrait's subtlety; on the surface the film could have been called simply Alexander, but blue-eyed Allwin as Fanny blossoms into a young adult as well by watching her brother's experiences. But Fanny is more of a silent observer. Alexander records the journey; and his recording reinforces the events themselves in affirming the importance and the reality of the imagination.