Number 161 on the top 1000 films of all time is the 1982 Swedish historical drama: Fanny and Alexander.
Directed by the legendary Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander is a partially auto-biographical film focussing on siblings Fanny and Alexander. When their father dies, their mother marries the local bishop, Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjo,) who proves to be a strict husband and abusive stepfather to the two children.
Having watched The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, I am very familiar with Bergman's style and Fanny and Alexander is no exception. It is introspective, reflective and very long. At over 3 hours long, it is too bloody long. And it isn't interesting enough to justify its long running time. I was falling asleep within the first half hour of the film.
Beyond that the film was just paced badly. I found myself becoming bored and restless. Like the Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, I think that Fanny and Alexander is a film you can only enjoy if you're a hardcore cinephile. As you may have gathered from some of my scornful reviews of supposed classic films, I don't qualify as a cinephile. There were many sequences where Bergman leant too much into the surreal and abstract. For example, the dream sequence near the end of the film became very tedious to watch. Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I don't have the patience to watch things like that.
And I found it a bit odd that the film was called Fanny and Alexander considering the two children don't really feature that much. If anything, the film focusses more on Edvard Vergerus. Having said this, Malmsjo was a formidable force on-screen. He did make for a genuinely scary villain - a villain who believed he was justified in every single action he took.
Overall, this is a film you'll only enjoy if you're a diehard cinema lover. Alas, I am not one of those, so this film was definitely not for me.
