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Just over 10 years ago,
Ingmar Bergman announced that the widely acclaimed Fanny and Alexander would
mark hi, last hurrah as a filmmaker, Although ,some critics had written him off
as earnest but ponderous, others were saddened by the departure of an artist who
had explored cinematic mood, -- from high tragedy to low comedy = during his
four-decade career.
What nobody foresaw. that Bergman
would find a variety of way, to circumvent his own retirement director
television movies, tailing theater production, and writing screenplay, for other
filmmakers to direct, Hi, latest enterprise as a screenwriter, Sunday',
Children, complete, a trilogy of family-oriented movie, that began with Fanny
and Alexander and continued with The Best Intentions written by Batsman and
directed by Danish filmmaker Bille August,
Beside, dealing with
member, of Bergman’s family in bygone times - it begins a few years after The
Best Intentions leaves off- the new picture was directed by Daniel Batsman, his
youngest son, Although it lacks the urgency and originality of the elder
Bergman’s greatest achievements, such as The Silence and Potions, it has enough
visual and emotional interest to make a worthy addition to his body of
work,
Set in rural Sweden during the late 1920s, the story
centers on a young, boy named Pa, clearly modeled on Ingmar Bergman himself.
Pu's father is a country clergyman whose duties include traveling to the capital
and ministering to the royal family, While this is an enviable position, it
doesn’t assuage problems in the pastor’s marriage, Pu’s young enough to be
fairly oblivious to such difficulties, but his awareness grows with the passage
of time, So do the subtle tensions that mar Pu’s own relationship with his
father, whose desire to show affection and compassion is hampered by a certain
stiffness in his demeanor and chilliness in his emotions.
The
film’s most resonant passages take place when Pu learns to see his father with
new clarity while accompanying him on a cross-country trip to another parish. In
a remarkable change of tone, this portion of the story is punctuated with
.flash-forwards to a time 40 years in the future, showing the relationship
between parent and child to be dramatically re versed: The father is now cared
for by the son, and desires a forgiveness for past shortcomings that the younger
man resolutely refuses to gram.
Brief and abrupt though they
are, these scenes make a pungent contrast with the sunny landscapes and comic
interludes in the early part of the movie.
Sunday’s Children is
a film of many levels, and all are skillfully handled by Daniel Batsman in his
directional debut. Gentle scenes of domestic contentment are sensitively
interwoven with intimations of underlying malaise. While the more nostalgic
sequences are photographed with an eye-dazzling beauty that occasionally
threatens to become cloying, any such result is foreclosed by the jagged
interruptions of the flash-forward sequences--an intrusive device that few
filmmakers are agile enough to handle successfully, but that is put to
impressive use by the Bergman team.
Henrik Linnros gives a
smartly turned performance as young Pu, and Thommy Berggren - who starred in the
popular Elvira Madison years ago - is steadily convincing as his father. Top
honors go to the screenplay, though, which carries the crowded canvas of Fanny
and Alexander and the emotional ambiguity of The Best Intentions into fresh and
sometimes fascinating territory.