The 87-year-old Ingmar Bergman is the greatest living director; for 60 years, he has relentlessly probed the modern psyche, the contemporary conscience and the post-Christian soul. Most cinephiles will have a favourite Bergman film; mine is this wonderful Scandinavian road movie in which the elderly Dr Borg drives with his daughter-in-law from Stockholm to the university town of Lund. It's a long day's journey into light, in which he revisits his life in dreams and nightmares. Along the way, he drops in on his mother, gives a lift to an embattled married couple and picks up three teenagers, one of whom (Bibi Andersson) reminds him of his lost adolescent love.
It's a spiritual and physical journey, a coming to terms with life. The original title, Smultronstället, translates as 'the wild strawberry place', a Swedish term for an ideal or epiphanous moment in a person's past. Borg is played by the greatest director of the golden age of Scandinavian silent cinema, Victor Sjöström, Bergman's idol and mentor, and the film is a deeply personal work that drew on the latter's experiences as well as a range of Scandinavian culture from Edvard Munch to August Strindberg. The other roles are played by familiar members of Bergman's rep company, and it was all was made for about £60,000. There's a monograph on the film in the BFI Film Classics series by my wife and myself, a labour of love in several senses.
Next week: François Truffaut's The 400 Blows.
