Fanny and Alexander

Released in 1982 in a 5-hour version for Swedish television and cut to 180 minutes for theatrical release, <i>Fanny and Alexander</i> was meant to be Ingmar Bergman's last film. Though the great auteur lived on another 25 years and even wrote and directed some smaller projects, <i>Fanny and Alexander</i> can still be seen as a great capstone to decades of legendary cinema.

FANNY AND Alexander deals with the great two preoccupations of Bergman's career, namely the absence of God and the unbridgeable gaps between human beings, but the result is wonderfully life-affirming. Fanny and Alexander are the children of Oscar and Emilie Ekdahl, actors in Uppsala circa 1907, but the film gives a panorama of the extended Ekdahl family, presided over ...

The eponymous children (Pernilla Allwin and Bertil Guve) live an happy upper-middle class life with their theatre-manager father "Oskar" (Allan Edwall) and mother "Emilie" (Ewa Fröling) and are looking forward to Christmas. Parties ensue and a good time is had by all until the father is suddenly taken ill. His death follows swiftly and their mother is soon being wooed by the rather puritanical bishop "Vergerus" (Jan Malmsjö) who has a rather different, more disciplinarian, attitude to bringing up the children. When they marry, the life of "Alexander", especially, becomes nigh on intolerable. "Emilie" is initially tolerant of her new husband's policies, but gradually she grows to hate him and to start finding a way to get herself and her chi...