Wild Strawberries Still Grow

This week’s class was a very interesting one for sure. Monday, we obviously went over the material that we would find on the midterm. We also briefly covered a period of film history labeled Italian Neorealism.

Italian Neorealism blends Christian and Marxist humanism and emphasizes emotions rather than abstract ideas. In other words, quite unconventional when compared to other films before this era. Italian Neorealism avoids clear plots and aims to target a loose structure while designing the backbone of a film. An additional fact about Italian Neorealism is that it is specifically known for its use of actual locations and exteriors as opposed to on-site, indoor studio sites.

The scenes in Italian Neorealism use conversational speech, giving even more life to the “realism” in the type of cinema description.

Ingmar Bergman’s often contain depressing themes, and some of them are just downright hard to watch. That was not the case that found when we watched it in class this past Thursday. Wild Strawberries began with a narration read by the old man. He was talking about his life, and eventually we were immersed in one of the many strange dreams he’d been having lately.

The dream begins as the old man is lost. He is walking down a city street, but there is an overwhelming absence of anyone else on the street. He looks at his pocket watch as if time is quickly passing him by, and he notices that the watch has no hands. All of the sudden the old man turns around to see what looks like a person, but as we saw it was some kind of a dummy that liquified after he touched it. The end of that charade brought about a driverless carriage containing a casket. I had the most peculiar feeling in my stomach that the old man would indeed be represented inside the casket in some form. But even though I was fully ready for my theory to come true, it still somehow took me off-guard when it was executed.

It was at this moment that I became ingulfed in this film and wanted to see more of these lucid dreams for which I myself was looking for meaning.

The old man’s daughter in law struck me very angrily at the start of this film. I viewed her to have a bitter personality, and an erroneous stance towards the old man. It is very clear that for many other reasons than what she tells the audience, she dislikes the old doctor very much. She calls him shellfish, and her eyes tell the story of someone who has no compassion towards the doctor.

This aspect of the daughter in law becomes contradicted throughout the film. For instance, the gas station scene when the owners refuse tom let the old doctor pay for his gas because of the kindness he once spread. I cannot help but sympathize with the old man and his position, because it seems that it’s the ones closest to him that have never been able to catch a glimpse of the man he really is.