Dream Plays
A still from ‘Fanny and Alexander’
Many of us have Christmas cultural ‘touchstones’ of one kind or another - events, stories, and music that evoke the essence of the season. I grew up listening to the Christmas Eve ‘Festival of Lessons and Carols’ at King’s College, Cambridge, on record and the radio, a service that my parents loved, and in early adulthood I used to enjoy its Dublin equivalent at St.Patrick’s Cathedral, emerging from what I recall as candlelight into the city’s chilly darkness to join friends at the Shelbourne Hotel for celebratory refreshments. Christmas Eve has always been more meaningful to me than the day itself, its bittersweet moods reflected in other personal touchstones, such as John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band’s Happy Xmas (War is Over), with its weary hopefulness, The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, in which conflicted affection overcomes despair and desolation, and in the sentimental film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, Frank Capra’s post-war classic inspired by The Greatest Gift, a short story written by Philip Van Doren Stern and loosely based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The film is the tale of George Bailey, who faces disaster on the day before Christmas, when his elderly uncle misplaces $8,000 belonging to the family business. Threatened with bankruptcy, George, who already harbours doubts about his self-worth, comes to believe that he is a complete failure and that he should bring his life to an end. A guardian angel, sent from Heaven to protect him, gives him a glimpse of what the world would be like if he hadn’t existed, and George is eventually relieved of his suicidal depression, persuaded of his value to the community. He returns home to his family, realising that love and fellowship are what makes life truly wonderful. Heartfelt and moving, its power rests, like many Christmas stories, on the transformation of sadness to joy.
I also used to watch the very long version of Ingmar Bergman’s magnificent Fanny and Alexander every Christmas season. An almost Dickensian tale of redemption, ghosts, and magic, it focuses, at least notionally, on two children, Fanny and Alexander, who live with their extended family in an early 20th century Swedish town. Their parents, Oscar and Emilie Ekdahl, and their grandmother, Helena, are closely involved with their own local theatre company, which, when the film begins, is producing its annual Nativity play. Not long after Christmas, and with abundant echoes of Hamlet, the play that the company is rehearsing when Oscar dies suddenly, the drama begins to unfold. Slowly but surely, Bergman takes the film beyond conventional realism and into a mode that is infused with a level of being that is visionary and dreamlike. The transition is heralded at its very beginning, as the ten-year-old Alexander gazes raptly into a puppet theatre, only to embark soon afterwards on a journey of discovery through the grown-up world, an odyssey not unlike the one that shaped the young Bergman, which he describes in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern. Alexander, who sees through the protective veils and hypocrisies of adult life, preferring to live out his stories and make-believe, which form a refuge from the uncomfortable demands and compromises of everyday reality, finds himself alone in the richly furnished rooms of the family home, and as he briefly hides underneath a table, a first moment of enchantment is introduced by a chiming clock, a statue that gestures at him, and the disturbing sight of a cloaked Grim Reaper dragging his scythe across the wooden floor before disappearing. The opulent house is not quite what it seems.
The first section of the film, set mainly in the theatre and in the Ekdahl house, is realistic in style. Most of the key characters are introduced as they take part in an extravagant Christmas party, and while it progresses, different aspects of their personalities and behaviour are revealed, defining their relationships with one another. As the family gathers, energy and emotion build and turn into excess, disclosing the fractures and ruptures that underlie its riches and apparent respectability. Copious amounts of food and alcohol are consumed, but as merry songs are sung and pompous speeches are delivered, less pleasant matters are hinted at or exposed. Oscar’s unexpected death, which follows the Christmas festivities, serves as a catalyst for a radical shift in the plot’s direction, for soon afterwards Emilie marries Edvard Vergérus, the local Bishop, moving into his grim palace, where he lives with his mother, sister, and invalid aunt. Emilie expects to bring the happy and carefree qualities of her previous life into her new one, but she quickly realises that Edvard's unforeseen harsh and authoritarian attitudes, especially with regard to her children, are uncompromising. The relationship between the Bishop and her son is especially troublesome, as Alexander, an imaginative, lonely, and stubborn boy, has a penchant for making things up, for which Edvard punishes him severely. The situation becomes a family crisis.
The film gradually returns to the surreal and dreamlike, and towards its conclusion, Fanny and Alexander find themselves in the home of Isak, an Ekdahl family friend and Helena’s erstwhile lover, who lives in a dark and mysterious house filled with curios and antiques, with his two adult nephews, the puppet master and magician Aron and his androgynous ‘mad’ brother Ismael, who is supposedly harmless but is nonetheless confined to a secure room. Isak reads a bedtime story to the children, apparently translated from Hebrew, which describes the journey of a young man through varied landscapes, encounters, and quests, and who forgets what he was seeking and even from where where he came; it is only the wonders and innocence he once experienced and wishes to rediscover that continue to drive him on his search. Later that night, wandering around the house on his own, Alexander stumbles upon Aron’s puppets, then encounters the man himself, who shows him a breathing mummy and talks to him about ghosts, before introducing him, with devastating consequences, to Ismael. It is no coincidence when, at the happy end of the film, back to normality and following a secular nativity scene, Helena reads an extract from August Strindberg's A Dream Play. ‘Anything can happen, all is possible and probable’, she says. ‘Time and space do not exist. On an insignificant foundation of reality, imagination spins out and weaves new patterns.’
For further exploration (and recollection)
‘Happy Xmas (War is Over): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN4Uu0OlmTg
‘Fairytale of New York’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9jbdgZidu8
The trailer for ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLR3gZrU2Xo
https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/fanny-and-alexander-0
‘Fanny and Alexander’ trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCXoXFdNa1o
A still from ‘‘Fanny and Alexander’