2017 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Owen Reese

The Dark Journey of FANNY AND ALEXANDER by Owen Reese (16)
2017 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place

The colorful, haunting 1983 Ingmar Bergman epic Fanny and Alexander dramatizes the battle between two ways of understanding the world: the way of magic, mystery and freedom, against rigid, rule-driven Christianity. The two children at the center of the film, Fanny and Alexander, live happily with a warm, spirited, extended family until a disaster turns their world upside down. They’re thrown from one world into another, each world being represented by the different houses they find themselves in over the course of the film. The story is their odyssey back to the peaceful, balanced world where started.

The film opens with Alexander alone, wandering around his family’s large, lavish home, a place that seems endless, without boundary, and full of mystery. Alexander is imaginative, perceptive and curious about his world. When he looks up at a statue of a nude woman, she begins to move. The moment is interrupted by his grandmother walking in, and asking him if he wants to play cards. He doesn’t respond, just looks startled and so she leaves him alone because although she didn’t see the statue, somehow she understands. (The grandmother is the film’s most dignified and thoughtful character, though she is always on the sidelines.) The moving statue is the first moment of magic we see. It’s an image of something natural, sensual, human. But it’s also unpredictable and startling. It could represent the spirit of magic, passion and freedom.

Alexander’s father and mother are introduced to us on Christmas Eve when the whole extended family comes together for a big, joyful party. The grandmother hosts, and we learn that she is a wise and caring woman who watches over her children. At the party, everybody – Alexander’s uncles, the kind maids, other family members – are singing and running through the house together, and the children experience this as an entirely sweet, innocent event of family life, Christianity in this house is a warm, celebratory faith about community, love, and safety. Unlike magic, it isn’t unpredictable or startling. It provides security in an otherwise chaotic world. Some unspecified amount of time after the festivities end, Alexander’s father is on stage rehearsing Hamlet, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Alexander is watching. Suddenly his father freezes, forgets where he is, and collapses on the floor. He dies – but comes back to as a ghost, exactly like Hamlet’s father. Both children see their father whenever their lives are about to change drastically (he also once appears to his mother, the children’s grandmother). They have a special connection to their father that isn’t strictly Christian.

The death of their father has serious consequences. After losing her husband, their beautiful, angelic mother marries an icy old bishop, a God-fearing man who wants control and order, nothing else. The mother and her children move into the old man’s plain, gray house, and bring none of their personal belongings with them. No piece of the humanism and spirituality from their previous life. The house is full of boundaries, rules, and barriers. The doors are locked, the windows are barred, and the children are not allowed to have toys. The grandmother’s house was full of soft furniture, warm colors, warm people. Everything here is hard and cold. There’s magic in the house, but it’s restricted by the tight walls of uncompromising Christianity, and God is used as a tool to scare the children into submission. When Alexander speaks of ghosts, he’s punished severely and told never to lie again. These are the horrors of an overly religious life. No freedom, no imagination, no color (quite literally). Everything is scraped back, tied up, clamped down, just like the hair of the women in the household.

The children are rescued. It’s hard to say how, but we know that a sorcerer, their great uncle Isak, a Jewish man (his religion is an intentional choice – it puts him outside the whole conventional Christian world) casts a spell and then takes them to safety. The children arrive at Isak’s house, and in it find marionettes lining the walls. They’re told never leave their room after dark for their own safety. Of course, Alexander wanders off that night in search of a toilet, and ends up exploring, just as he explored his family home at the beginning of the film. Unlike the Bishop’s barren house, this place is cluttered with magical relics and other strange items. And then the boy hears the voice of God. He cowers in fear. The booming voice comes from behind a door, slightly ajar. And just as God is stepping out to show Himself, He is revealed to be just the sorcerer’s nephew, holding a puppet of God. Just like God was previously used as a puppet by adults to scare children metaphorically, in this case, it was literal.

The nephew shows Alexander around the house, and introduces him to Ismael, a man (played by a woman, a large boundary that’s dissolved) who’s locked away for the safety of others, he’s told. Alexander spends some time with Ismael and begins to understand how dangerous and evil unbounded magic can be. Ismael asks him to write down his name. He writes ‘Alexander Ekdahl’ but upon second viewing, he sees he’s written ‘Ismael Retzinsky’ instead. Ismael says, “Perhaps we’re the same person, with no boundaries” It goes to show how uncontrollable this new environment is, and tells us that Ismael is simply the dark side of Alexander’s own mind, locked away for the safety of others.

The scene ends with Ismael teaching Alexander voodoo; he can tell Alexander wants to hurt the Bishop, but can’t admit it. “You won’t speak of that which is constantly in your thoughts” Ismael says. He describes the old man’s death and when Alexander says “Don’t talk like that” Ismael replies: “It is not I talking, it is yourself.” As he speaks, the Bishop’s bed bursts into flames and the Bishop burns to death.. Alexander’s mother is freed. The sorcerer’s house brought out Alexander’s power to make life-saving changes, but it also brought out the murderous hatred he held inside for one man, and caused that man’s death.

The film ends on a relatively happy note. It shows the extended family reconciled and back together for another party. It’s now springtime and the world inside the grandmother’s house is exceptionally bright. There’s an abundance of the color pink and everyone’s celebrating two new babies born into the family. The scene portrays a vision of rebirth. Life has found its order again both in the real and magical sides of the world. Now there’s balance.

The key to that balance is Fanny and Alexander’s grandmother. Throughout the film, she’s been strong and caring, a symbol of stability. She embraces the best parts of Christianity, the love, the ritual, the celebration, as we see in the beginning, but she’s also open to the world of magic and nature, and has a Jewish lover (Uncle Isak). The children aren’t the only ones who notice the ghost of their father, so does she. Her world is the one we see in the large, warm happy house. It isn’t dull and dead like the Bishop’s house, but it also isn’t a hellish, scary pit of mystical energy like the marionette home.

But to finish, we get one chilling reminder of recent events. Alexander walks down a hallway and behind him appears the Bishop’s ghost. He knocks Alexander to the floor and tells him he will never be free. It’s a reminder that he may feel safe in his cozy home, but there are things he’s learned that will haunt him forever. He can never regain the innocence he lost during his journey, and he will never forget how dangerous the world can be.