Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) poster & wallpaper

Victor Sjostrom, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin

Explores the disillusionment of an elderly physician, Professor Isak Borg, as he reflects upon his life and begins to perceive his mortality. As he travels to Lund to receive an honorary award after 5...( read more  read more... )0 years of medical practice, he finds himself repeatedly affected by intrusive dreams and hallucinations that expose his darkest fears. He slowly comes to realize that the choices he made in the past have created a cold and empty life, devoid of real meaning or value. Finally, he achieves redemption and reintegration through forgiveness and the love of his family.

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Unrated, 1 hr. 31 min.

Directed by: Ingmar Bergman

Release Date: December 26, 1957

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DVD Release Date: February 12, 2002

Stats: 1,089 reviews

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  • organgrinder136
    November 19, 2009
    organgrinder136
    a story of an old man on a road trip with his daughter-in-law, the dreams he has while sleeping and the strange characters they come across on the way. it's the first film i've ever seen by ingmar bergman. it could be best described as haunting, strange and pleasant all at the sa...( read more)me time
  • her69eyes
    March 21, 2009
    her69eyes
    "Wild Strawberries", which serves as a sort of companion piece to his previous film, "The Seventh Seal", is not always called Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece, but it's certainly regarded as his most accessible film. In a sense, it very much is "The Seventh Seal"'s reflection, howeve...( read more)r nowhere near as grim, nor does it have the same level of religious connotation. While the old protagonist here does, at one point, come face to face with a man who's wife he killed because of a misdiagnosis, for the most part the idea of "judgment" is spared for a sense of nostalgia and an embrace of life's simple pleasures. By pursuing an intellectual but withdrawn life, the man loses sight of his youthful exuberance and the simple pleasures of something as insignificant as a strawberry patch.

    Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Seastrom), a 78-year-old professor, is about to receive an honorary award for 50 years of medical practice. He decides to make the trip to receive the honor by car, much to the dismay of his cranky wife, Agda (Jullan Kindahl), and along with him he takes his daughter-in-law, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), who has been on poor terms with her husband, Isak's son, Evald (Gunnar Bjornstrand).

    During the drive, the professor stops off at his childhood home and flashbacks are stimulated by a wild strawberry patch. He recalls his love interest, his beautiful cousin, Sara (Bibi Andersson), and how he lost her to his mean-spirited brother. Shortly thereafter, Isak is confronted by another Sara (also played by Bibi Andersson), who now lives in the home. She and her two friends, Anders (Folke Sundquist) and Viktor (Björn Bjelvenstam), tag along for the ride. In a sense - it's not only a wonderful meditation on life, but perhaps one of the first real road trip movies.

    I've heard "Wild Strawberries" criticized as over-pretentious and bogged down by heavy-handed symbolism. I greatly disagree, and felt that the dreamlike quality of the picture was completely involving and I was never struck by overblown metaphors. Perhaps a lesser director would make some of this pretentious, such as the dream sequence featuring clocks with no hands and a man with a horribly disfigured face, but Bergman makes them completely inviting and in no way masturbatory.

    I liked "Wild Strawberries" much more than "The Seventh Seal" as I felt it's tone was much more consistent. It's a classic tale that doesn't really offer surprises, however it's so well done that it feels completely fresh. I wouldn't put this up there with "Cries and Whispers" as my favorite of Bergman's films, but it's certainly still a wonderful movie.
  • sanjurosamurai
    January 2, 2009
    sanjurosamurai
    predictable bergman in style and temprement, while this film was slow it was probably the most interested ive been in a bergman film. not quite as epic as seventh seal but maybe more profound, this classic is simple but engaging. a classic and worth while film.
  • AgentLexi2132
    September 14, 2008
    AgentLexi2132
    ''The punishment is loneliness.''

    After living a life marked by coldness, an aging professor is forced to confront the emptiness of his existence.

    Victor Sjöström: Dr. Isak Borg

    Ingmar Bergman has done it yet again. First Seventh Seal blew me awa...( read more)y with it's masterful strokes of genius and now, Smultronstället AKA Wild Strawberries.
    The genius is replicated in it's questions and answers it gives us the viewers on a very important aspect to me, Mortality... Thus also the purpose of our life.

    Wild Strawberries addresses the choices of a Professor who has succeeded academically but with love and company it begins to blur and sadly vacant.
    Dreams are used to great effect to give us some rather surreal imaginative insight into Borg's subconscious and the looming grip of Death's chilling touch.
    I especially was impressed by a dream of his in which he goes up behind a man only to touch him and for the said man to collapse, a mutated head, and a chilling symbolized metaphor to boot. Proceeding to see himself in a coffin is equally chilling yet gives emphasis on the man's fear of death...

    Victor Sjöström as Dr. Isak Borg, the main protagonist in the lime light, wonderfully gives life to a faceted character who we see change throughout the progress of the film. It's lovely to see as he becomes sentimental and we see memories of his, in a Christmas Carol fashion. It's beautifully executed by Bergman and wonderfully acted out by Victor.

    Bibi Andersson as Sara, the beautiful, deep, faceted Daughter-In-Law of Isak Borg, really does shine everytime she is on screen. Her beauty doesn't eclipse the fact that she remains in the film a talented actress, and proves she's not just a pretty face as she deals with some challenging material, that the plot throws at us.

    Jullan Kindahl as Agda, Folke Sundquist as Anders and Björn Bjelfvenstam as Viktor represent the young generation and their energized outlook on life. Was interesting to see both men fighting about the existence of God, which like Wild Strawberries uses Black and White, the same can not be said of the issue to do with this age old question. The truth is somewhere in the middle, man's invention to fool himself into thinking he isn't alone.

    Max von Sydow as Henrik Åkerman, also pops up, and I was extremely reminiscent of him in Seventh Seal. Was pleased to see him crop up again in a Bergman collaboration Picture.

    Wild Strawberries is full of hidden meanings and messages, our race against time to live, to make the right choices, and our realization that no choice is wrong or right. In a sense the title isn't just describing Strawberries, its describing People, like a Strawberry we too wither and die, starting out full of life and a tasty blooming vitality. The loss of youth, the pain of growing old, and the primal fears of being alone and dying.

    Wild Strawberries makes us imagine and fear time. Time is the enemy, as we get from the symbolic clock with no hands. We may be able to take the hands away but we can never stop time. Our heart also is a clock of sorts and the furious beating of ones heart depending on it's pace can be another fear, another definition of our perception of time and our fear of being powerless before it. Wild Strawberries definitely let's this daunting fact hit home.
  • PvtCaboose91
    September 1, 2008
    PvtCaboose91
    "If I have been feeling worried or sad during the day, I have a habit of recalling scenes from childhood to calm me. So it was this evening."


    Wild Strawberries (also known by its foreign title Smultronstället) is a surreal, expressionistic creation from

    ...( read more) renowned Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. During 1957, Bergman directed two of his most celebrated masterpieces: The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Both of these exquisite films sincerely delve into themes of life and death. Where The Seventh Seal dealt with the futility of absconding death, Wild Strawberries is a hauntingly beautiful and entrancing meditation on our morality, relationships, faith, and the realisation of death's inevitability. The film is a classic introspective production and a triumph in world cinema. In a sense it's fundamentally a cerebral road movie. Bergman first evoked this concept while standing at the door of his grandmother's house and wondering whether he'd re-enter his childhood by stepping inside. He pervades this concept with thought-provoking messages and surrealistic dream sequences which Bergman was probably most recognised for. Not long into Wild Strawberries are we presented with a nightmarish dream sequence. But this celebrated sequence is much more than a slice of expressionist symbolism: it establishes the tactic of anticipating future events and reveals that the central protagonist is a vulnerable figure who is worthy of our compassion despite all his ego, petulance and bigoted aloofness.

    Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries is a bittersweet tale of an elderly college professor's journey from emotional seclusion to salvation and, ultimately, personal regeneration. Professor Isak Borg (Sjöström) is a disillusioned aged physician whose self-indulgent cynicism has left him isolated. As he reaches a tender old age, he begins reflecting on his life and starts perceiving his mortality. Isak is bestowed with an honorary University degree in recognition for 50 years of medical practise, and must travel to Lund to receive it. He travels to Lund by car with daughter-in-law Marianne (Thulin). During this journey Isak is strained to come to terms with his imminent death as he reflects on his childhood memories and life regrets. For the professor, the road trip develops into an otherworldly journey where the present is distorted by shadows from his past, and where the boundary separating dreams and reality has been erased. This is primarily exemplified when the professor wakes from a dream of an idyllic summer past with adored cousin Sara (Andersson) to meet her virtual reincarnation in the form of Sara the hitcher (also played by Andersson) whose two companions remind Isak of himself and his brother who won Sara's heart. Above all, Isak's mind is infested with memories, premonitions, reveries, and nightmares which offer illumination on his cold and empty life which lacks any significant meaning or value.

    Gunnar Fischer's stylish, mesmeric black & white photography perfectly captures the wonderful locales and the images that imbue Bergman's wildly inventive imagination. Writer/director Bergman scripted the film while in hospital for two months whilst suffering from gastric ulcers. Bergman's confrontational views on human existence permeate his screenplay. In spite of suffering in a hospital bed during the film's conception, Wild Strawberries emerges as the director's most elegiac and humane production. Throughout the course of flashbacks and interactions with characters (both imaginary and real), Bergman builds a compassionate and poignant portrait of a man coming to terms with sorrows and compunctions of an emotionally constrained existence.
    The cinematography creates a moody and atmospheric setting as the film glides from scenes of expressionistic distress to pastoral idyll. This is especially effective during the dream sequence encompassing faceless people and clocks sans hands as Isak moves through haunting, empty streets and eventually encounters a coffin containing his own corpse. This scene is both compelling and troubling. It's a sequence which speaks to our very soul, circumventing all senses and firmly grabbing hold of our deepest fears.

    The highlight of Wild Strawberries is the miraculously sensitive performance courtesy of Victor Sjöström. This film marked Sjöström's final screen performance as he died a few years after filming wrapped. The actor portrays Professor Isak Borg as a cantankerous and irascible old man who has proved successful in his professional life, but has failed to connect with family and friends on a personal level. Many close-ups reveal Sjostrom's face expressing his character's inner conflicts, making his performance one of the most memorable in cinematic history. Bergman's allegorical road movie slips between present and past, dream and reality to explore the external and internal worlds the aging central character played by Sjöström. Sjöström's performance of an elderly man who's outwardly content yet internally burdened with disabling scars is perfect...never striking an incorrect note. He's surrounded by a remarkable supporting cast.

    Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin, Wild Strawberries is one of the truly outstanding works of post-war European cinema. It may creak in places and it might make an audience sleepy, but its evocation of the nostalgia, trepidation and repentance of old age remains unsurpassed. Gunnar Fischer's luminous lens compliments Bergman's terrific screenplay. In its revelation of human character, desire and chagrin, Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries is a potent and masterful film that cannot be missed.
  • ElCochran90
    November 17, 2009
    ElCochran90
    "If I have been feeling worried or sad during the day, I have a habit of recalling scenes from childhood to calm me. So it was this evening."

    SMULTRONSTÄLLET (1957)


    Director: Ingmar Bergman
    Country: Sweden
    Genre: Drama
    ...( read more)Length: 91 minutes

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    Ingmar Bergman is one of the few filmmakers within the history of cinema that achieved the unachievable goal of directing two of the best films of all time in the same year, not to mention that he also managed to transform the remote Swedish cinema into an internationally visionary one. With Smultronstället, he creates the counterpart of Det Sjunde Inseglet (1957). Whereas one film focused on the humanly obstinate questionings about the existence of God and the meaning of life and death, this film takes such plot from an imminent death to a necessary reconstruction of life itself. The influence of Smultronstället is immense, but its vision and filmmaking quality still remain unparalleled and unrepeatable. Avoiding filmic clichés, the depiction of a flatly boring character and nonsense events, Bergman masterfully conglomerates the elements that are universally accepted as the most relevant ones to be analyzed in the existence of oneself and makes an outstanding, visually beautiful and spiritually compelling masterpiece of only ninety-one minutes long.

    Doctor Isak Borg is a seventy-three-year-old man who lives in solitude and who is about to be invited by destiny to a journey of epiphanies and self-discovery after having lived a life marked by coldness, loneliness, intolerance and hatred. During his journey, he will have to face the mistakes that led him to his actual state of being while revisiting old and new relatives and reencountering several acquaintances. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay ? Written Directly for the Screen, ludicrously losing it against Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk (1959). However, director Ingmar Bergman won the Golden Berlin Bear and Victor Sjöström won the FIPRESCI Prize for the body of his works and his performance in the movie at the Berlin International Film Festival of 1958. Ingmar Bergman also won a Silver Ribbon for Best Director ? Foreign Film at the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists of 1960 and the Italian Film Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival of 1958 under the category of Parallel Sections.

    Smultronstället is the most complete and fully-developed essay on disillusionment and existentialism, featuring one of the best leading performances of all time, thanks to the highly talented actor Victor Sjöström. His character is exactly the one that inspired the principal one in Pixar's Up (2009): both are seventy-three years old, both are bespectacled and curmudgeon men who are about to begin an unforgettable and emotionally striking journey, both have spent a life of solitude because of the personalities they executed in their surrounding society, both are convinced to suffer an attitude transition because of external events. However, Ingmar Bergman's second perfect masterpiece is one of the most challenging character studies ever committed to celluloid and has the capacity of transforming even the people?s lives. It is the very behavioral transition the character suffers the one that may culminate in inspiration and self-reflection because of its thought-provoking nature. Bibi Andersson, who plays the character of Sara, Isak?s daughter, made an outstanding acting work as well.

    Most of the dramatic and ultimately cathartic cinematic power of Smultronstället is originated from the psychological similarity that Isak Borg may share with the viewer. He is a man who lives encapsulated in a sphere of imagined independence and human intolerance. Being based on these characteristics, the floor under the feet of this man had to be shaken. The event that triggers the bomb of his transformation is an extraordinarily well-shot, scarily mysterious and unpredictable surrealistic dream sequence in which he finds himself walking through empty streets and encountering faceless, anthropomorphic beings and handless clocks. Suddenly, a coffin that was being transported by a pair of horses falls right in front of him. The coffin is finally opened, revealing his own corpse, causing an absolute sensation of terror in him. When he wakes up, his journey finally begins. What was initially meant to be a trip towards Lund University for receiving an honorary award after fifty years of medical practice ends up being a challenging experience that involves total awareness of his current physical and emotional personality and a possible realization of insufficiency.

    Ingmar Bergman wrote the remarkably poetic script while he was in hospital suffering from gastric ulcers. Moreover, the original concept came to Bergman?s mind when he drove to Uppsala, the place where he had been born, and stood outside his grandmother?s house wondering how it would be like to enter the house and to find out that everything has been the same just as it was during his childhood. The idea of ?realistically opening a door and entering a specific stage of our lives for then opening another door so we could come back to the present reality? was a striking idea for him. On a personal note, I find this idea considerably challenging and nostalgic since, at some point in my life, I reflected over the same concept several times after the desire of changing several mistakes I had committed in the past went through my mind. Despite the film working on death?s inevitability and the humankind?s unstoppable mortality, everything is irreversible, and Smultronstället offers the wise conclusion that the only and most adequate solution for obtaining redemption is to correct our faults, to see life as a nonstop river of events and consequences, to gather the pieces of the past and to work on the present.

    Gunnar Fischer is, once again, the film?s cinematographer, offering a very-well calculated family atmosphere and using the magic of black-and-white images in all of its visual glory. The film?s nature somewhat demanded a certain attention towards the musical score, and the direction by Bergman is wonderfully delicate. What may be a cultural and immortal piece of entertainment filmmaking is actually a compelling study of the human condition. The bubble of stubborn doom must be broken and we, as an avid cinematic audience, are asked to read between lines. Symbols are scattered throughout with troubling dreams, but the ethereal beauty that Berman has imposed throughout Smultronstället make of this cerebral ride more of a literal reference towards the weakness of the soul and the fortitude of the spirit. Condemning materialism and exalting the social coexistence and the love obtained through the family, this is one of the best directed dramas in the entire history of moviemaking. Its introspectiveness, its vibrant filming locations and its decoration with the aroma of recalled wild strawberries restore the faith in mankind.

    100/100
  • raggedydavey
    October 26, 2009
    raggedydavey
    A lot easier for me to follow than some of his other films. I don't think I've seen a film with so many good looking people (all those Swedish women).
  • jackgbowman
    October 21, 2009
    jackgbowman
    Bergman tellig a forbidden story
  • NickCoalNoir
    September 29, 2009
    NickCoalNoir
    Professor Isak Borg: What is the punishment?
    Sten Alman: The punishment? Well, I guess it'll be the usual.
    Professor Isak Borg: The usual?
    Sten Alman: Yes. The punishment is loneliness.

    I've been meaning to see this movie for awhile now and it didn't ...( read more)live up to my expectations. I think the main problem was that I couldn't get into the movie. But, I did enjoy the synopsis; old age and looking back on your life and seeing how your actions affected others. Also, the ending kind of fell flat for me, I think it could have been a little stronger. It's worth a watch though.
  • mattdlevy
    August 31, 2009
    mattdlevy
    Good movie, but in the end it did not feel like it went anywhere

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  • terenlih
    August 29, 2007
    terenlih
    This movie is a tribute to Old Age. It is very insecure in the beginning, and the nightmare accentuates the idea. The voice-over is also very unsettling. However, during the road trip the movie becomes more and more humane and warm. Fear is transformed into a feeling of tranquility and the sense of loss is changed to a mere nostalgic and bittersweet feeling. What is the cause of change? should be acceptance. He accepts the approaching death, the fact that he has lost something in his adulthood, and that he has failed to comprehend human emotions and deal with relationships.
    While The Seventh Seal only talks about accepting death, but Wild Strawberries talks about accepting everything in the world as it is. Only by overcoming fear and despair, and facing up to his own guilty self, can he find himself at peace. In the concluding scene, Izak recalls his childhood again, finally achieving a peace of mind from his memory.
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