Wild Strawberries (1957)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Crotchety retired doctor Isak Borg travels from Stockholm to Lund, Sweden, with his pregnant and unhappy daughter-in-law, Marianne, in order to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater. Along the way, they encounter a series of hitchhikers, each of whom causes the elderly doctor to muse upon the pleasures and failures of his own life. These include the vivacious young Sara, a dead ringer for the doctor's own first love.
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What critics compared Wild Strawberries to
It's a thing we've seen in, like, Fellini or Wild Strawberries.
Thematically, Jay Kelly seems to be trying to maneuver between two great classics – Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½.
Yes, it’s mildly evocative of the Ingmar Bergman classic Wild Strawberries, from 1957, but it’s strikingly similar to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, released in the U.S. just a month ago.
These bits exploring the porousness between memory and reality recall Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, though their poignancy doesn’t make up for their clunky deployment.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly doesn’t have strawberries like Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. But it does have an aging man reflecting on his life as he travels to collect a lifetime achievement award.
At times, Jay seems like a Hollywood version of the egotistical professor played by Victor Sjöström in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.
If nothing else, Reiner seems weirdly tuned into the Baby Boomer zeitgeist — in the early ’70s, his role as Mike “Meathead” Stivic on “All in the Family” made him America’s hippie; in the early ’90s, his Castle Rock Entertainment gave us “City Slickers,” which put a big smiley-face on male menopause; and now that Woodstock Nation is pricing nursing homes, we get “The Bucket List,” which plays like Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” reimagined as an uninspired sitcom and travelogue.
Shot by Claro in gloriously rich colors, the “Justine” half of “Melancholia” is a rich comedy of manners and buried family secrets, deliberately recalling Bergman’s country-house comedies, like “Wild Strawberries” or “Smiles of a Summer Night,” and also perhaps “The Celebration,” by von Trier’s onetime Dogme 95 collaborator Thomas Vinterberg.
The notion of a road trip as a springboard for a lonely intellectual’s existential crisis brings to mind Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries , and there’s quite a bit of David Lynch here too, especially as past, present, and future narrative strands merge to suggest that we are watching a character’s recollection of events, perhaps during a death rattle.
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Believe it or not, such comparison is not as far-fetched as it may seem, for Allen has been strongly influenced by Bergman - beyond just borrowing a specific visual trick from Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” (in flashback scenes showing him as a carrot-topped, girl-crazy grade schooler, Allen is also present as a grown man, offering comments on his behavior) or including a scene where he and his co-star, Diane Keaton, meet at a theater playing Bergman’s “Face to Face.”
Filmmakers who have ignored Hitch's advice with varying results include the Paul Verhoeven ("Total Recall"), Christopher Nolan ("Memento"), the Wachowski Brothers ("The Matrix"), Terry Gilliam ("Brazil"), Ingmar Bergman ("Wild Strawberries"), David Lynch ("Lost Highway") and Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris"), Cameron Crowe via Alejandro Amenábar ("Vanilla Sky"/"Open Your Eyes") and that's just off the top of my head.
Reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries," the film is lyrical and passionate, but never sexually titillating as was so widely predicted, and there is a strange, rewarding fascination in watching one character go through his own journey, whether it be in physical or emotional terms.
Although Sentimental Value includes various nods to Bergman’s cinema, I kept thinking of Wild Strawberries throughout—only later did I realize that Victor Sjöström’s character was also named Borg, when I took a brief look at the film’s Wikipedia page. Curiously, the page also explained the meaning of the film’s original Swedish title, Smultronstället. Idiomatically, the wild strawberry patch signifies a hidden gem—a place of personal or sentimental value, often little known, it read. Pure coincidence? Direct reference? Either way, I had found yet another IKEA stool in the film.
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If I had to define “The Irishman,” I would say that it’s basically “Wild Strawberries” with handguns.
With its multigenerational cast, its portrayal of British family life in country (Cornwall) and city (London) and its loose, unhurried pace, “About Time” feels like a personal summing-up, a low-impact, wistful-whimsical Anglo take on the “Wild Strawberries” model.