The Drive Home: A Meditation on Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries”
I don’t own a car and I’m rarely the one behind the wheel, but I love long drives. During my childhood, many summer and weekend hours were spent on the road to Big Bear Lake, a small tourist getaway in the San Bernardino Mountains, where my grandparents live and care for a cluster of cabins on three-acre plot of land that has been in the family since 1912.
These drives to Big Bear have their customs — two hours just me and my mom, headed towards our family home — she in the driver’s seat and me sitting shotgun. We talk about whatever comes to mind. She regales me with stories about growing up on an oil camp in South America or living out of a van in Berkeley and Santa Cruz during the 70s. I share with her the gossip from my friends and tales from campus.
Many times, though, we sit silently in the car, listening to an eclectic mix of classic pop and teeny-bopper hits — N’SYNC, Michael Jackson, Sting and Hilary Duff — as the flatlands of the desert freeways give way to the curving mountain roads and ultimately the gravel lane that leads to my grandparent’s house, surrounded by tall pine trees and dotted by wild flowers. As if by magic we arrive at the very spot where my great-great grandfather pitched a tent and built a log cabin just over a hundred years before.
What is it about long drives that makes them seem so magical? I couldn’t quite my finger on it, until seeing Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.
For the film is essentially a road trip. On the day that seventy-eight-year old Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom) is set to receive an honorary degree at his alma mater in Lund, Sweden he decides to drive there, instead of flying. He is accompanied by his daughter in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thullin). They encounter a trio of hitchhikers — a cheeky young woman, named Sara (Bibi Anderson), with two suitors, Viktor and Anders, in tow. Later, Isak nearly crashes into a Volkswagen beetle, driven by a bickering married couple.
But the hazards of the journey are not only on the road. They also exist in Isak’s head. Daydreams and nightmares delight and haunt the old man along the way. His vision of his one-time fiancée, also named Sara and played by Bibi Anderson, picking wild strawberries in the thicket near his uncle’s summer house, quickly turns from an idyllic image into a scene taut with sexual tension. Isak’s dapper brother Sigfried (Per Sjostrand) tempts Sara into kissing him on the mouth. As if symbolizing lost innocence, Sara drops the basket of strawberries. As soon as those berries hit the ground, one intimates that Isak’s heart is sinking, too. On another pit stop, while napping in the car, Isak is taunted by a test proctor who calls him “incompetent” for failing to pass a mock examination and then presents to Isak a scene of his dead wife trysting with an elegantly dressed stranger in a wooded clearing.
Isak’s car not only transports him to the darkest cervices of his mind and memory, (whether real or fabricated remains a mystery), it becomes a confessional as well. At the start of the drive, Marianne reveals her disdain for her father-in-law and the rigid loan reimbursement program he exacts upon his own son, Evald, (Gunnar Bjornstrand). But later on, she reveals her pregnancy to Isak and confesses that she has separated from Evald because he does not want children. While Marianne and her husband’s relationship remains in flux, a good, long drive seems to have mended some of the mistrust between Isak and his daughter-in-law.
An unlikely alliance and loyalty forms, speaking to the unexpected ways in which long rides bring us closer together, exactly as the mileage count increases and the destination nears.
Bergman himself was inspired to create Wild Strawberries during a springtime drive through Sweden, while heading north from Stockholm. Near the town Uppsala, he was struck by a sudden desire to see his grandmother’s house. There, in the familiar courtyard, he was inspired: “completely realistically, about suddenly opening a door…and entering another period of one’s existence, and all the time the past is going on, alive. [1]”
This is what I imagine Isak to be thinking as he sleeps in his son’s house, content at having made the journey to Lund by car — having visited and relived his past, however painful, once more.
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In my mom’s car there are not only old CDs with songs that we play on repeat, and stories that we retell each other again and again on, there are secrets, too, that are unburdened once and then sealed forever like a promise. Past and present magically reside side-by-side, just as my mom and I sit side-by-side in the front seat of our car, watching the mountains grow bigger and the trees grow taller, as we approach our familiar destination. There is certain sacredness within this ritual of driving to and from Big Bear, especially as they become fewer and far between. My grandparents have put their home up for sale, so now, we never know which drive to Big Bear will be our last. While the prospect of an ending lingers over each drive down the hill, there’s still the promise of the road ahead, when Grandma calls us up for just one more visit to see the leaves turn, the snow fall, or the wild flowers bloom once again.
[1] “Wild Strawberries,” Turner Classic Movies. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
