Once upon a time, I was checking the customer reviews on the movie discs “Fanny and Alexander” (The Criterion Collection Version) in Amazon randomly. And I have seen “the most helpful critical review” published by an professor of economics who came from Ingmar Bergman’s hometown – Sweden, which said: “it was impossible to find any information about the region until you opened the package, and found out that there was a mismatch of regions.” And the following replies all told him the obvious fact such as “I’m surprised you didn’t know as the region A coding is common knowledge with Criterion. You should have kept it and bought either a m/r player or spare Region A machine.” Besides this interesting “worst” review, there was even a customer complaining that: “IT IS NOT A CHRISTMAS MOVIE!”…
Surely, what Ingmar Bergman wanted to represent in this almost 3-hour masterpiece was not only the festive occasion of the during the big family’s Christmas reunion. Continuing his early film “Wild Strawberries”, to express the open and pluralistic thinking of life through the experience from external events. This kind of internal discussion had run through his entire film career. Especially in his representative work “The Seventh Seal”, the searching for the meaning of life was embodied by a nearly mythologized way.
*The film criticism was written by Simplified Chinese at first (which is my mother tongue), then I translated into English for your reading convenience. And down there is the original version.
闲着没事在美亚上看CC版的《芬妮与亚历山大》客户评价，其中最多人点赞的差评是一位来自伯格曼故乡的经济学博士：抱怨说花大钱买了碟后设备无法播放，评论下面众人都一致告知他说CC版蓝光碟本来就是锁A区。要不换台全区播放器要不就电脑上下个破解补丁；还有顾客大呼“这竟然不是一部圣诞专题电影！”…
在这部片长3个多小时的巨作中，伯格曼想要表现的当然不止圣诞佳节大家族团聚其乐融融的欢快场景。沿袭其早期的《野草莓》，透过外在事件传达出身处生命的开放性思考；这种内在探讨一直贯穿着他的整个电影生涯。特别是在其代表作《第七封印》中，对于生命意义的追寻被以一种近乎神话化的方式予以展现。
A×R×T 