Isak spars with Agda in the touching, if lighthearted, opening sequence. Yet, for all the family that once surrounded him, it’s Isak’s housekeeper Miss Agda (Jullan Kindahl) who is now closest to his experience of a “family.” Photographs in his study tell us who they are: his dead wife Karin (Gertrud Fridh), his son Evald (Gunnar Bjornstrand), and his aged mother (Naima Wifstrand). If anything, he’s been more ruthless to those he was supposed to love than he imagines.īergman’s first scene shows Isak hunched over his desk, his face turned away from the camera and, symbolically, away from people.
David Sjostrom as Isak Borg and Ingrid Thulin as his daughter-in-law Marianne on the way to receiving Isak’s Doctor Jubilaris honor in “Wild Strawberries.” (Criterion Collection)Īs the story unfolds, Isak’s initial understanding of his own misanthropy turns out to be understated.
Marianne (the lovely Ingrid Thulin), his daughter-in-law, accompanies him. The journey isn’t so much a car ride as a voyage of self-reflection. Isak, a 78-year-old widowed physician, contemplates his life through flashbacks, dreams, and experiences while on a long drive from Stockholm to Lund University to receive his Doctor Jubilaris, an honor bestowed for 50 years of service. “ Wild Strawberries”(1957) begins with lines uttered by the protagonist, an irascible professor Isak Borg (Victor David Sjostrom): “I am an old pedant, which, at times, has been rather trying for myself and those around me.” This forms the kernel of screenwriter-director Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish drama on selfishness and its poisoning of personhood.
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