Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film “Wild Strawberries” (“Smultronstället” in Swedish) is a portrait of a man whose mother was cold. The protagonist, a retired doctor and researcher, Isak Borg, experiences haunting dreams and premonitions on a trip to receive an award. Peeling back the layers of his emotional life, the viewer finds the cold indifference of his mother at the root of Isak’s loneliness and isolation.
[Spoilers ahead!]
The story follows Isak for a memorable day of his life when he and his daughter-in-law, Marianne, travel by car to the city where his only son lives to receive an academic award. Along the way, they stop at the summer cottage where Isak spent parts of his childhood and where he was jilted by his cousin Sara who married his brother.
In the present day, while stopping for Marianne to take a swim, Isak is awoken from a dream by another Sara, a young woman whose father now owns the property, who is taking a trip with her boyfriend and a chaperone. Isak agrees to drive the three young people as they embark on a trip for Italy. Another Sara, deciding between a childlike and godly man and the agnostic scientist and man of the world. The parallelism is heavy-handed but can be forgiven and even enjoyed while reading English subtitles in an artfully rendered black-and-white.
Further down the road, the car is almost struck by an oncoming car driven by a bitterly quarreling couple. Piled into the car, the contentious middle-aged couple disturbs the young people, and Marianne eventually leaves them on the side of the road with the tearful wife begging for forgiveness as she leaves the car.
After a picturesque lunch, Isak and Marianne stop in at the home of his elderly mother. She has outlived all of her children but Isak, and she spends her days alone, remembering and sorting through the remnants of life with 10 children. She brings out a box with dolls and coloring books. She remembers details about the children. Isak’s mother is not evil; she is cold. She fulfilled the physical obligations of maternity but there is clear evidence that she did not have a close relationship with her children.
Some analysis of the film mistakenly asserts that it is the number of siblings that prevented Isak from receiving his mother’s love, that there was “always someone in the way.” This ignores the fact that many inept mothers only have one or two children. It also ignores the fact that having lots of siblings is fun! When he returns to the summers at the cottage in his dreams, there is a sense of excitement with the twins composing music for their deaf uncle and fishing expeditions and someone falling in the water. We also don’t have to rely on our own senses to come to this conclusion; the old Isak remarks in the film that when he has had a difficult day, he lies in bed thinking about his childhood summers in order to relax. Generally, unpleasant experiences are not those we return to in order to calm our thoughts; of course, it is fun to spend the summer running with a pack of children! It was not, then, the number of children that made his mother cold.
There is a quintessential quality of warmth in the archetype of the mother. When warmth is absent, it is a noticeable deficit. The film does not make his mother an excuse for Isak’s miserliness and aloof coldness to his family. In his dreams, Isak is put on trial and sentenced to the loneliness he has chosen.
He is also not beyond the possibility of change. As he travels back to the area he grew up and first began his career as a doctor, there is evidence in the film of his generosity that was greatly appreciated. With his own wife and child, however, he does not allow intimacy and focuses on transactional obligations. He, like the bickering couple he meets on the road, cold and unforgiving.
For mothers of a certain age, fear of your own deficiencies can become a fixation. Reading “Brideshead Revisited” as a single co-ed leads to discussion of aesthetics and the concerns of single young men. Reading the book as a mother, women can sometimes not get beyond the character of Lady Marchmain. While she seems innocent enough, a superfluous character to a college student, she seems foundational, causal, and disturbing to the mother navigating relationships with children, doctrine, and the meaning of life.
It’s not reading into things to view Isak’s mother as central to the emotional resonance of the film. Speaking about the film, Bergman noted: “[The old mother] says: ‘I feel so horribly cold, what can it be due to, particularly, here in my stomach?’ The notion occurred to me that some children are born from cold wombs. I think it’s a horrible idea, little embryos lying there shivering with cold.”
“I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through,” he said. “I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions.” A blogger notes, “This observation seems all the more chilling when you consider that he had, by then, married three times and fathered at least five children.”
The “little embryos lying there shivering with cold” takes on new resonance when you consider the IVF embryos in cold storage awaiting the disordered passions of worshipful and narcissistic parents. Does the literal cold leave an impression on nascent life?
This thinking can be taken to extremes, as with the zany French doctor who asserts in the documentary “The Business of Being Born” that the lack of natural oxytocin at birth has led to a generation without love and human affection at the beginning of life. Perhaps he was a bit more modest in his claims, but that’s how I remember it.
There are any number of ways these meditations could lead us, and “Wild Strawberries” offers a path of hope that I doubt would be possible if the film were made today.
The mother is not just an abstraction, sometimes present, sometimes unneeded. Even now, mothers are the necessary portal of all human life, and through the substance of their being, babies grow. How do wounds and lack of warmth lead to malformation in the child?
Bergman’s film, with an optimism and hope that did not appear to pan out in his own personal life, suggests a way that growth and healing is possible, even for the person who began life as that shivering emryo of a cold mother.
In interviews, Bergman rejected this sanguine interpretation, telling Playboy, “But he [Isak] doesn’t change. He can’t. That’s just it.” He continued, “I don’t believe that people can change, not really, not fundamentally. Do you? They may have a moment of illumination, they may see themselves, have awareness of what they are, but that is the most they can hope for.”
That illumination in itself can be the beginning of change. Not in who and what we are but in how we relate to other people. The work of art transcends the tortured artist who created it. Isak clearly feels warmth in his relationship with his housekeeper and his daughter-in-law. The chains of habit are, indeed, difficult, if not impossible, to undo, but as he drifts off to sleep, it is with a warm of feeling and closeness that is undeniable.
Elsewhere, Bergman asserted, “What matters most of all in life is being able to make that contact with another human. Otherwise you are dead, like so many people today are dead.” “But if you can take that first step toward communication, toward understanding, toward love, then no matter how difficult the future may be – and have no illusions, even with all the love in the world, living can be hellishly difficult – then you are saved. This is all that really matters, isn’t it?”
Isak will die a difficult man, but because of a journey he took one day, he will also be connected to people again. Mothers are the necessary path into being. No mother is perfect, and even for those whose mothers forget them and fail them fundamentally, there is hope.
