Fanny and Alexander: The enduring power of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece

“Don’t act Hamlet, my son. I’m not Queen Gertrude, your kind stepfather is no King of Denmark, and this is not Elsinore Castle, even if it does look gloomy,” Alexander’s mother scolds during Ingmar Bergman’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece.

It’s a fitting allusion for one of the very few works of art to rival the drama around Shakespeare’s brooding Dane.

The sweeping grandeur of this three-hour 40th-anniversary reissue is the madly impressive tip of the iceberg.

Bergman’s account of his troubled relationship with his Lutheran minister father was intended as his farewell to cinema, even if, afterwards, he continued to write screenplays and also directed a 2003 television movie, Saraband, which returned to the well of Scenes From a Marriage.

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It pained the director to lose many of the ghostly elements found in the five-hour TV miniseries of Fanny and Alexander for his theatrical cut. Even after these edits, the uncanny reigns. From the opening sequence, in which Alexander – Bergman’s surrogate – goes searching for his sister and mother in an empty room, Fanny and Alexander is a haunted, mysterious territory, somewhere outside of the adult world, adjacent to the Celtic idea of thin spaces, and rounded off by a reading and critique of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play.

Is Alexander a boy with a huge imagination or is he really seeing apparitions? Or is the phantasmagoria in some sense metafictional?

The opulent early sequences – a lush showcase for art director Anna Asp and costume designer Marik Vos – play with the boundaries of reality, introducing the children’s miniatures, their strangely bawdy intellectual clan, and the moderately successful theatre run by their parents.

Disaster strikes when their father, Oscar, dies from a stroke soon after, leaving their mother, Emile, to run unwisely into the arms of a puritanical bishop whose cruelty towards Alexander, in particular, is as unflinching as the boy is flighty: “The love I feel for you and your mother and sister is not blind and sloppy,” he insists. “It is strong and harsh.”

The children are, in effect, held for ransom. Should their pregnant mother divorce the bishop, her actions will be characterised as neglect, and Fanny and Alexander will remain with their stepfather. Their ultimate escape is as darkly magical as any fairy tale in a film that somehow casts a spell for every second of its extensive run.

[ Through a Glass Darkly review: Bergman’s tale in an unspecific Ireland ]

[ The Touch: Ingmar Bergman’s lost drama of an extramarital affair ]

Parts that were intended for Bergman regulars Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow are impactfully occupied by Ewa Fröling and Jan Malmsjö. The wide-eyed, enigmatic Alexander (Bertil Guve), meanwhile, appositely looks like a guide to another world.