House Guests

By R.C

FANNY AND ALEXANDER Directed and Written by Ingmar Bergman

A grand old house dominates this film. Impossibly ornate, stocked with paintings and furniture and bric-a-brac and candles, candles everywhere, it invites the children who live in it to become adventurers into its secrets. The mansion broods over a quiet Swedish town, in the winter of 1907, and it is the place where ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve) and his younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and their parents and grandmother, the Ekdahls, reside. But with a leap of film fancy it becomes the house that Bergman built: an edifice constructed of 40 films in nearly 40 years, and filled with ghosts and demons, strong women and tortured men, knights playing chess with Death, and human souls wrestling themselves to a fine stalemate. In this house the film maker, a great artist with the imagination of a lonely child, keeps spinning spooky fairy tales of the 20th century spirit.

In Fanny and Alexander, Bergman means to offer a summing up of all his films, characters and moods. The first part of this 3-hr. 17-min. entertainment (reduced from a five-hour series made for Swedish television) is a family idyl. Oscar Ekdahl (Allan Edwall) is impresario of the local theater, and life at home is a succession of agreeable rituals: caroling, speechifying, sumptuous meals, flirtatious sex. The house is the perfect home for Alexander, whose favorite toy is a "magic lantern," a primitive movie camera. He can prowl through the unoccupied rooms poking into old mysteries, scouting loca tions. A pillow fight with his sister can send feathers swirling through the night light -- his first special effect.

Alexander's mother Emilie (Ewa Froling) is fair and frail, a concordance of traditional wifely virtues. Love and duty are as one to her, so when Oscar dies, she allows herself to receive the attentions of the town's righteous young bishop, Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjo). Beyond her sense of responsibility is a feeling her children can neither understand nor sanction: Vergerus kindles an erotic flame she never knew with dear, fudgy Oscar. When Emilie, Fanny and Alexander move into the Vergerus household they find that it allows no other light.

Black cats skulk underfoot; the faces on wall icons frown with disapproval at any liberal impulse; the chief servant, Justina (a delicious turn by Harriet Andersson), has the butch haircut and sadistic ca prices of a prison-camp guard. In this house of silent horror the children can take refuge only in dreams of escape -- to the arms of an old family friend, the Jew Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson), whose house has some old, dark secrets that, in the mind of a child, can seem as exciting as black magic.

Three houses, resting on three fundamental beliefs: in art, in religion, in magic.

No other film maker has put these beliefs to such rigorous artistic tests as Bergman. Here, though, he has a merry time juggling his three weighty balls, maneuvering his characters and his audience from one house to another, from reverie to terror to awe. This is a movie where, as Isak says, "anything can happen." A nude statue can beckon to a wide-eyed boy; Fanny and Alexander can disappear from inside a steamer trunk; the ghost of Oscar Ekdahl can return home for a chat with his old, living mother. Such is the unique chicanery of movies, and Ingmar Bergman knew it long before George Lucas did.

At least in its shortened theatrical version, Fanny and Alexander never quite achieves the bedtime-story spell it strains for. The good feeling of the first scenes should be as warm and steady as the lights on a Christmas candelabrum; instead it seems more an act of the director's will.

Only when the action switches to the Vergerus house, where the folks are really mean, does the film come to life. Not to worry: that leaves two hours of good movie from an old master. At film's end, one Ekdahl pays tribute to the power of the imagination: "a splendid force held in trust for us by all artists." Moviegoers can be grateful that the force is still with Ingmar Bergman.

-- R.C. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.