In contemplating the writing of this review, one of my first thoughts was that in many ways the 1982 Fanny and Alexander is for Ingmar Bergman and the cinema what In Search of Lost Time was for Marcel Proust and the novel. And then, in Ingmar Bergman Bids Farewell to Film, a one-hour documentary (one of the three included in Criterion's supplementary materials) made for Swedish television in 1984, the director, while talking with a fairly clueless interviewer (Nils Petter Sundgren), comes up with the following thoughts about his grandmother's house in Uppsala, Sweden: "I carry it in me as a memento from my childhood. Sometimes, when falling asleep—it's a very good way to go to sleep, the state between being awake and falling asleep—I step into Grandma's apartment and walk through the rooms." This, of course, is exactly where Proust's massive, seven-volume novel starts, with the narrator projecting the magic lantern (a theme-object in both artists) of the unconscious mind onto the screen of the conscious mind, which is able to grasp the material thanks to that state between wakefulness and sleep. Both artists also understood that the essence of the past can only be captured in a work of art that, rather than literally reproducing the events contained in what Proust calls "voluntary memory," plumbs the depths of the "involuntary memory" by recombining characters, places, and events into a magical tableau that must, over a lengthy development (the original version of Fanny and Alexander runs over five hours), generate its own paradigms.

And so, to give the most obvious example, Bergman, rather than literally reproducing his own family situation by making the father of Alexander and Fanny (Bergman did in fact have a sister) a strict Lutheran pastor, turns the children's father (Allan Edwall) into a sweet but rather ineffectual actor married to a much stronger woman (a taxing and multifaceted character portrayed with incredible sensitivity and depth by Ewa Fröling), who is also an actress and comes from a wealthy family, like Bergman's mother. The film's entire first act (as it is called in the long version) is devoted to joyful Christmas celebrations that take place mostly in the sumptuous apartment of Fanny and Alexander's grandmother (Gunn Wållgren, in one of film history's most captivating performances), a widow who has a longstanding relationship with a Jewish antique dealer (Erland Josephson), and whose warm but world-weary presence in many ways holds the family together. It was by plunging into the Christmas spirit that Bergman, as he put it, hit the hidden spring that came gushing forth with such strength that the entire remaining screenplay grew out of it. It would, in fact, be difficult to imagine any film putting together the colours, sounds, movements, music, and all the other elements involved in a family Christmas at the turn of the last century with more exquisite presence than Bergman has in Fanny and Alexander.

What becomes evident is that this form of life-affirming, pagan Christianity, if you'll forgive the apparent oxymoron, has much more in common with the cabbalistic magic and animism that pervade the shop of the Jewish merchant than it does with the ascetic, controlling, death-driven Christianity of the Lutheran bishop within whose cold and barren home Fanny and Alexander will soon find themselves imprisoned following the death of the actor father and remarriage of the mother, who the long version suggests had been having an affair with the Bishop (Jan Malmsjö).

And therein lies a major facet of the film, a facet that those, including Bergman's interviewer in the documentary mentioned above, who tend to see Fanny and Alexander as basically a joyful celebration of childhood, tend to skim over, probably because Bergman paints his own situation with his father, who eventually became pastor to the Swedish king, with such stark colours that a chill seems to settle over everything as we watch it. As the Grandmother remarks to her Jewish lover, even in the midst of the Yuletide merriment, "The happy, splendid life is over, and the horrible, dirty life engulfs us." And so, Fanny and Alexander find themselves locked up in the house of their new stepfather, who may or may not have driven his previous wife and two daughters to their death (a chilling scene cut from the theatrical version suggests a version of the story that contradicts Alexander's vision of three victims trying to escape their imprisonment). Confined most of the time to an all-but-bare room with bars on the windows, the two children watch the transformation of the Bishop's self-righteous rigidity, which he shares with his sister and mother, into a form of sadism that ends up in child abuse, an abuse aimed at stifling Alexander's most vital quality, his vision and creativity. This creates a seething hatred in Alexander that gets channeled and then cataclysmically released by the Jewish man's nephew, a hyperintelligent androgyne named Ismael, ingeniously—and chillingly—cast by Bergman with a woman actor (Stina Ekblad). (Ismael's brother, Aron, is played by Bergman's son, Mats.) There are those who have criticized Bergman's introduction into the narrative of 'magical' events for which he offers no explanation. But it is precisely this form of magic that brings us full circle back to the spirit, in the strongest sense of the word, of the film's opening.

By the end of the film, the abandoned theatre has been reopened, and Fanny and Alexander's family is once again united in a celebration of life. But there is a slight evolution that has taken place. Having begun in celebrations that suggest a family more given to a prepatriarchal than patriarchal spirit, having progressed through some of the most chilling, death-ridden facets of a highly patriarchalized culture and its religion, and having momentarily landed in that mystical territory defined in large part by the Cabbala, Fanny and Alexander ends up in a minisociety that is almost purely matriarchal. We find two baby daughters at the head of the banquet table, with the children's nanny and the daughter of one of the son's heading to Stockholm together, and with Fanny and Alexander's mother saying, as she walks arm-in-arm down the hall with the Grandmother, "Now we're the ones in charge, aren't we." Thus, the movie has resolved into a new vision of life best expressed by the combination of Eastern and Western mysticism one finds in Strindberg's A Dream Play, in which the mother and grandmother will act together. And so, rather than laying out the various people and events from his life in a literal-minded, linear, quasihistorical narrative, Bergman, in Fanny and Alexander, has laid bare in an unforgettable manner the warring factions of his own psychology, factions that, however, have direct manifestations in the culture at large.

While the theatrical version of Fanny and Alexander can be obtained on a single Criterion DVD, I enthusiastically recommend the five-DVD set, first and foremost because of the five-hour version of the film that it offers. While some of the cut moments are extremely subtle, such as the appearance to Alexander's eyes of a death figure early on in the film, there are many entire scenes, including the phantasmagorical realization of a story read by the Jewish man to Fanny and Alexander in a room, almost psychedelically shot in red-on-red, that he has given the children in his own house. While I have always loved the narrative and characters of the theatrical version, the TV version adds an epic dimension well worth the extended viewing time. I also particularly recommend another documentary included in the Criterion box set. Entitled The Making of Fanny and Alexander, the film allows viewers to participate, without any voice-over commentary or any added interviews, in a minuscule number of the set-ups, generally resulting in around three minutes of footage each day, that went into the construction of Bergman's magnificent edifice, his last theatrical film as a director. It is also fun to watch the occasional, very mild clashes between Bergman and fellow visual artist Sven Nykvist.

A word about the visuals. A man I know who has a major home-theatre setup complained to me that he found Criterion's transfer to be "overly digitized." This was not at all my experience in watching the theatrical version on a twenty-six-inch LCD monitor and the TV version on a thirty-six-inch regular TV run through a stereo system that revealed the transfer's excellent sound quality, which I presume is fairly close to what most of those watching these DVD's will have. I have to say that, if ever a film deserved something close to a perfect transfer onto DVD, it is the deeply moving (on all planes) Fanny and Alexander, and Criterion has not failed to give the film the quality it deserves. I have seen Fanny and Alexander several times in the past, at least twice in a theatre, but I never before noticed how strongly Bergman colour-coded his film, not only in pure terms but also in conjunction with amazingly conceived art (Anna Asp), set (Susanne Lingheim), and costume (Marik Vos) design. The Christmas scenes are dominated by breathtakingly saturated reds and greens, while, following the father's death and the passage from the more pagan ritual of Christmas to the Bishop's much more death-oriented religion, the film's colour scheme shifts into more pastel hues, particularly greens, violets, and yellows. And, if anything, what might be called the numinous clutter in the apartment of the old Jewish man, gets even more saturated hues. One can also, thanks to Criterion's amazing high-definition digital transfer, sit back and revel in the utter beauty of the ways in which Bergman's regular cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, lights his stunningly composed shots.