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.”

Fanny and Alexander (made both as a feature and as a longer TV series) has a very different trajectory to that of the typical Christmas movie. Its main moments of happiness and seasonal cheer come right at the beginning. The film then turns very chilly indeed.

The setting is Uppsala, Sweden, in the early 1900s. Alexander (Bertil Guve) is a sensitive and observant 10-year-old boy with a vivid imagination. He is first seen alone in the family’s lavish apartment just before the Christmas festivities begin, playing with the toy figures in his cardboard theatre and roaming from room to room.

The opening section of Fanny and Alexander is as enjoyable a depiction of a family Christmas as you will find on screen. Bergman throws in a lavish nativity play. There is drinking, singing, flirting, arguing, a huge family dinner, a conga dance around the house, a pillow fight and, most famously, Uncle Carl (Börje Ahlstedt) in his long johns on the staircase, entertaining the children with a mini-symphony of farting that generates enough wind to put out the candles.

Bergman freely admitted the influence of Charles Dickens on Fanny and Alexander. Many of the characters he created are Dickensian archetypes: the wise and kindly grandmother, the eccentric uncles in their frock coats, the beloved father Oscar (Allan Edwall) performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet very badly, the adored mother (Ewa Fröling) who dotes on Alexander.

Unlike Dickens, Bergman isn’t coy about showing his characters’ sex lives. In particular, Uncle Gustav (Jarl Kulle) is lecherous in the extreme, seducing the maid Maj (Pernilla August) and then drunkenly trying to satisfy his wife as well.

Bergman, who also made Persona, The Seventh Seal and Scenes from a Marriage, had a reputation as a perfectionist given to explosive temper tantrums when others didn’t meet up to his exacting standards. However, speaking this week to The Independent, Pernilla Wik (née Allwin), who played Alexander's sister Fanny aged 11, describes the production as “seven months of fun”.

“I hadn’t done anything like this before. I didn’t know who Ingmar Bergman was before we started,” the former child actor continues. Production began in September 1981. She talks about making mischief behind the scenes with her fellow young star, Bertil Guve, racing bikes around the Swedish Film Institute, where much of the movie was shot, riding up and down in the lifts, and being indulged by the cast and crew.

Although the story begins in 1907 and Bergman himself wasn’t born until 1918, much of the material here is drawn from the director’s own youthful experiences. “I think that anything I have done of any value is rooted in my childhood,” Bergman later reflected on the “ferociously” autobiographical roots of the project.

At the height of the festivities, Bergman drops hints about darker times ahead. The characters who appear so loveable and carefree at Christmas all have their problems. The Shakespeare-reciting father’s health is shot. He will soon die a painful and squalid death. Uncle Carl isn’t just the big-hearted clown who knows how to make children laugh, but a needy and “second-rate” alcoholic, “a s*** and a cad” in his own words. He has run out of money and holds a grudge against the world, which he takes out on his long-suffering wife by abusing her.

The strangest scene in the film is at the father’s funeral, an extravagant affair with a brass band and huge crowds of mourners. As he follows the cortege into the church, the quiet and sensitive Alexander suddenly mouths expletives: “Piss, hell, s***.” Unaccountably, his mother later marries Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjö), the bishop who officiated at her late husband's funeral. Vergerus is as cruel as Alexander's father was kind.

Alexander’s idyllic childhood ends abruptly as he and Fanny adjust to life in the bishop’s household.

Bergman’s father, Erik Bergman, was a Lutheran pastor. The character of the sadistic bishop is clearly based on him. Erik was a vain and irascible man who, according to Bergman, used both corporal punishment and psychological torture on his children. Bergman blamed his father for stealing away affection that his adored mother would otherwise have lavished on him.

The director conceived Fanny and Alexander in the autumn of 1978 when he was living in Munich and was in a state of near despair. In the mid-1970s, the Swedish tax authorities had come after him, accusing him of making false statements about his income. He had briefly been arrested and suffered a nervous breakdown shortly afterwards. Although the charges were eventually dropped, he had felt so affronted and humiliated that he had gone into voluntary exile.

Those close to him have often talked of Bergman’s knack for dramatising events in his own life. The “tax imbroglio”, as the director called it, inspired Fanny and Alexander as much as his vexed relationship with his father did. Stuck in Munich, a long way from home, he decided he “wanted to make a film far different from anything I had ever done”, and to escape into his childhood.

Don’t look here, though, for the easy consolations of Hollywood’s seasonal movies. Bishop Vergerus is far, far nastier than Scrooge. He is a money-grubbing, wife-abusing, anti-Semite who mistakes austerity for godliness.  

As he is punished by his stepfather, Alexander turns his imagination toward revenge. The film itself can be seen as an act of score-settling on its director’s behalf, a way of getting back at those who tormented him as a boy.

With its mysticism, references to poltergeists and voodoo, and its dark stories about drowned children whose presence can still be felt, Fanny and Alexander briefly threatens to turn into a full-blown horror movie. Certain moments, for example the bishop’s contemptuous treatment of the Jewish antique dealer Isak (Erland Josephson), would never be found in mainstream family films. However, this is still seasonal fare, beginning and ending with Christmas celebrations. The christening of two newborn babies adds to the seasonal feel.

Fanny and Alexander, completed in 1982, was Bergman’s “final” feature, although he continued to write screenplays and to direct TV dramas and stage plays until his death 25 years later in 2007. He told The New York Times that it represented “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker… the time with Fanny and Alexander was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. To make another picture and have it feel grey and heavy and difficult with lots of problems – that would be very sad.”

“No man is a failure who has friends,” Clarence the angel famously tells James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. You won’t find such glib or sentimental one-liners in Fanny and Alexander, but it was the Swedish director’s “farewell to cinema”. He was determined to end on a note of reconciliation. The film has a generosity of spirit not always found elsewhere in his work. For Bergman to have continued making films about angst, death and despair after this would have seemed like the sheerest humbug.  

In Sweden, the film is still warmly embraced. “Everyone knows about it,” Pernilla Wik says. “When we talk about having Christmas with a lot of people, you say, ‘Oh, it’s a Fanny and Alexander Christmas.’”

The sadness, though, is that Bergman has such a daunting reputation that audiences abroad still haven’t taken Fanny and Alexander to heart in the same way they have all those other, far flimsier, seasonal crowd pleasers that fill our screens at this time of year.