Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries)

My wife and I watched Wild Strawberries Saturday night, an old Ingmar Bergman film. What a wonderful movie. It's the tale of an old doctor driving to a ceremony with his daughter-in-law, where he will receive an honorary degree from a university. Along the way he reminisces a lot and has several disturbing dreams that hint at things he could've done differently in his life. It was a beautiful meditation on loneliness and how even late in life we can find happiness for ourselves and ease some of the pain we have caused others. It has some of Bergman's characteristic dark strangeness, particularly in the dream sequences, but what struck me most about it was how human it was. It deals with ordinary people in ordinary situations, and overall struck me as the sort of film that just isn't made in America anymore. Partially that's because filmmaking and storytelling techniques have evolved, but I think it also has something to do with the worship of celebrity that has infested all aspects of our culture. We can't tell stories about ordinary people unless something extraordinary happens to them. We've forgotten how interesting our day-to-day lives actually are. Of course, I'm sure that if I search, particularly among independent filmmakers, I could find counterexamples, but certainly very little reaches the mainstream that is on a recognizably human scale and is not about some extraordinary tragedy/event/whatever. All cultural vitriol aside, this was a very beautiful and uplifting movie, and I highly recommend it to anyone who thinks ordinary people are fascinating.