Rating: 4.5/5
Criterion Challenge 2023 | 26/52 | Bong Joon-Ho’s Top 10
Everything can happen. Everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns.
Sweden, Winter 1907
Death visits young Alexander Ekdahl and grants him the power to commune with the dead. He drags his scythe across the rug as a statue comes to life.
Is this real?
The Ekdahl’s are a wealthy family who run a local theater. We watch a nativity play performed for a packed house.
After, they host a Christmas party. Some celebrate good cheer, while others carry melancholic Christmas memories.
When everyone goes to bed, Alexander sets up a magic lantern and reads a story to Fanny. Emilie, their mother, catches them and tells Oscar, their father, to take over. He creates a narrative about a chair. He presents it as one of the most extraordinary chairs in the world.
Later, the stage actors practice Hamlet. Alexander’s father, Oscar, plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
He has trouble remembering his stage directions and then collapses.
Oscar gets to say goodbye to each of his children and leave the theater to his wife, Emilie. And then he dies.
The downward spiral of Fanny and Alexander’s life begins.
Emilie marries a bishop whose fetishization of suffering extends to all those around him.
Alexander sees his father’s ghost, who cannot intervene.
Alexander will meet unbearable pain, loneliness, and a horrifying vision of the future.
Despite the world’s search for respite from this cruel life, Alexander remains devoted to storytelling and invention.
If there's a god, he's a shit, and I'd like to kick him in the butt.
Oscar engendered Alexander’s vibrant imagination. Oscar carried his sense of play from the stage to his home life, bringing such brightness to their household.
The bishop is such a vile person. He and his family are like adults in a Roald Dahl book.
Bong Joon-Ho had the theatrical version on his list, but I wanted to watch the television version since it’s the most complete version of the film. Bong Joon-Ho chose this for the box art and the ending.
I can’t imagine this story without the imagination bits! Bergman cut that for the theatrical version. I’m glad I saw this one first.
The stage plays are beautiful! One stands out where it is raining on stage. A man wears a candle on his head, covering it with an umbrella. It’s such a surreal image.