Why Fanny and Alexander is the finest Christmas film of all

Ingmar Bergman’s Oscar-winner has a very different trajectory to that of the typical seasonal movie, writes Geoffrey Macnab, but it’s a lot better than many Hollywood classics

Bertil Guve and Pernilla Allwin in Fanny and Alexander (Rex Features)

This Christmas, Die Hard, Home Alone, Love Actually, The Polar Express and The Nightmare Before Christmas are all back in cinemas; Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is being revived on TV yet again; and a new version of A Christmas Carol has just been released. In other words, we’re being fed exactly the same diet of snow, schmaltz, Dickens, Bruce Willis and an angel called Clarence that we get on screen every year.

One film that isn’t showing anywhere, and surely should be, is Ingmar Bergman’s multiple Oscar-winner, Fanny and Alexander (1982). It has a fair claim as the finest Christmas film of all and yet has largely fallen out of circulation in the UK. Bergman’s reputation as a brooding, European, art-house auteur seems to put audiences off. The Swede is the high priest of cinematic angst. Viewers warily expect psychodramas about death, dread and sexual betrayal, not reindeer and jingle bells. They should look again. Fanny and Alexander has its share of very bleak moments but it’s also the richest, warmest and funniest among the more than 50 features that Bergman completed.

American director Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Dazed and Confused) summed up the power of Bergman’s movie when he introduced a special screening in his hometown of Austin, Texas: “It really is one of the great views of childhood, both the joys and exhilaration… and just terror.”