fanny and alexander (dir bergman)

The Bergman fan summoned me from weekend indolence to come and watch this late epic with him, urging me to book before it sold out. I hadn't seen it in twenty years. The friend had once given me or my wife, he's not quite sure which, the full-length video of the extended version of the film, which was apparently shown on Swedish TV. It sat on a dusty shelf and was never watched.

Sitting down in a half-empty Barbican cinema, I was increasingly glad of that. You can watch a film on TV and the narrative will come across; but not the spectacle. Fanny & Alexander is a big film, in length and detail, and much of that would be lost on a TV screen. The opening sequence, set around an early twentieth century Christmas day in a slightly bohemian Swedish family, lasts for over an hour. It's like watching a tapestry take shape: a stitch here, a stitch there, and gradually the complete vision of Alexander's family comes to life, in all it's bawdy, colourful glory.

This detail is reflected in the film's sets. I don't know there's all that much to say about Fanny & Alexander. I told my friend that I tend to book tickets at the side of the cinema, not the middle, in case I feel the need to flee, and he, a lover of the centre, replied: But this is Bergman! He was right. There was no reason to flee at any point during the course of the film's three hours. Just an invitation to sit back and bask in the physchological portrayals, the occasional surrealisms, the deft pacing of an old master.

So the only revelatory thing I have to offer concerns these sets, the full beauty of which can only be guaged on a cinema screen. The home of the bohemian family, captured in such detail during the first hour, seemed fussy, lavish, Victorian, ornate. The screen is packed to the rafters with rich colours and velvety fabrics. This is contrasted with the home of the wicked stepfather, the hidebound bishop who torments Alexander so. The bishop's home is all austere off-whites, stripped bare walls, an antiseptic minimalism. The point of note is that, at the start of the 21st century, it is the cruel bishop's taste which reflects our notions of civilised living - clean Ikea lines, simple colour schemes. The unruly lifestyle of Alexander's father's family, which Bergman celebrates so vigorously, is allied to out-dated notions of domestic taste; it seems fusty and old-fashioned in comparison with the bishop's bleak modernity.

As noted, the best place to apreciate this is on the large screen. So I am glad I never sat down to watch the video, although, were it still there to be watched, I would now sieze the chance to find out what happens in the other three hours which were ruthlessly cut from the shortened narrative of the cinema release.