Fanny and Alexander is Ingmar Bergman’s The Tempest, which is to say the fantasy that crowns his oeuvre. Unveiled for Christmas in 1982, the saga of theatrical royalty in the provincial, picturesque Uppsala of 75 years before unfolds on a Dickensian, indeed Tolstoyan scale, with 60 actors in speaking parts and 2,000-plus extras. To raise the curtain, Bergman stages the gregarious Ekdahl family’s annual Nativity pageant and subsequent Christmas banquet-bacchanale. For his grand finale, the Ekdahls reassemble at a scarcely less Lucullan gala dinner in honor of a double christening. Good luck sorting out the timeline. The babes in their cradles were conceived well over a year apart. That’s just one of many incongruities apt to fly by unnoticed.
Fanny and Alexander are the children of the young actress Emilie Ekdahl, who suddenly loses her husband, runs the family theater for a while, and then settles down with the puritanical Bishop Edvard Vergérus, who rules his household as it it were a prison, severing all ties to Emilie’s former life. Controlling Alexander’s wicked imagination pushes Vergérus to the limit. At long last, chance—or is it magical thinking?—puts an end to the nightmare, and Emilie returns to the vast collective Ekdahl bosom. In a coda, she’s trying to coax her actress mother-in-law out of retirement with August Strindberg’s phantasmagorical novelty, A Dream Play.
“Everything can happen,” the old lady reads, opening Strindberg’s text at random. “Everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns.” Chronology, identity, the hereafter, the very laws of physics—the whole shebang’s in flux.
Countless realms intersect in Fanny and Alexander, each with its own frissons of the uncanny. The Ekdahl playhouse vibrates with Shakespearean echoes. The Bishop’s bare “palace” harbors vengeful ghosts, not to mention a mountainous, bedridden she-ogre who is very much alive. “Uncle” Isak Jacobi’s cabbalistic curiosity shop, crammed with puppets, is an Ali Baba’s cave aglow in the bioluminescence of an undead mummy. Elsewhere in the shop, a seraphic androgyne sits encaged like a second Hannibal Lecter.
The Uncertainty Principle reigns even where the ground should be most solid. Sloe-eyed, dark-haired, sleepily sensual Alexander stands a head taller than Fanny, your prototypical blond, blue-eyed Swede. But which child is older? Does the title suggest that Fanny came first? There’s a hint that Oscar, the siblings’ father of record, gave up marital intimacy after the birth of Emilie’s first child, and the Ekdahls are by and large a joyously polyamorous lot, so there’s that. For what it’s worth, Pernilla Allwin, who played Fanny, was born five days before the half-Spanish Bertil Guve, who played Alexander. Guve auditioned against his will, but won the part by what Bergman called “acting with his eyes”—and by telling a tall tale (très Alexander!) about having killed his grandfather.
By 1980, Bergman was in his early 60s. With such varied triumphs as Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Persona (1966), and Autumn Sonata (1978) to look back on, he conceived Fanny and Alexander as his swan song, a miniseries in five parts. But first, he premiered the movie as a 183-minute theatrical feature, holding the 312-minute cut until the following year. From then on, Swedes in great numbers would spend December 26 binge-watching the full version—a tradition you might consider adopting. And for a chaser, check out Bergman’s 110-minute scrapbook on celluloid The Making of Fanny and Alexander, which documents the director’s irreverent joie de vivre, his clairvoyant attention to detail, and his epic failure to bend a black cat to his will.
The five-part miniseries of Fanny and Alexander, as well as The Making of Fanny and Alexander, are available for streaming on YouTube
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
