Original Title: Fanny och Alexander
Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography by Sven Nykvist
Cast: Bertil Guve, Pernilla Allwin, Ewa Fröling, Jan Malmsjö, Gunn Wållgren

Glorious from start to finish, its three-hour length notwithstanding, Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander is pure cinematic brilliance. God bless the Swedish Embassy for lending us a spotless 35mm print, so fresh it looks like one of the first reels used when the film had its initial release more than thirty years ago. Every frame of this stunning genius breathes with fragile contradictions: life and death, angels and demons, kindness and cruelty, truths and lies, innocence and guilt, simplicity and extravagance, spirituality and the lack of it. Bergman manages to weave a canvas with such austere mastery and harrowing majesty, it turns wickedness into beauty, so moving one questions the law of emotions if there is even one.

For period pieces are fond of exploiting their exquisite sceneries, ancestral homes, lavish feasts, patios that feel like the most comfortable place on earth, and the royalty of these people whose exaggerated gestures let us feel how much has changed since then, it seems that we already know what will happen in the next stroke of their hands or the fate of a time-bound romance exalted by war. But in Bergman’s universe they are nothing but mere devices, for even if you place his story into a setting more recent, or perhaps during the turn of the millennium, into a world where people are treated like zombies and loved like vultures, one would still feel the plight of Alexander and the entire Ekdahl family, the Bishop’s hypocrisy, and a country in despair behind those grand landscapes and fjords.

The philosophic nature of Bergman is enough to tick someone off and find his way out of the theatre whose exasperated air is shared by pseudo-intellectuals, highbrow socialites, passive moviegoers and, most interesting of all, students who, to their astonishment, leave the cinema with dreary eyes and nausea threatening in a few minutes. When someone watches a film and it ends almost on the day after, one starts to question, and in a brief second wonder, the devotion that he has to cinema. Did he finish the film just because he needs to finish it, while he has all the freedom to leave, or is it an unconscious desire to devote one’s self to a beautiful film till it becomes a habit, an obsession? When darkness spreads its wings like a falcon in flight, it surprises me how Bergman, in almost the same amazement when Tarkovsky visits me in my dreams for a week and too bad it never happened again, looms his virtues with extreme pessimism — a cruelty with passion, a family without its soul, a spirituality without god. This is the only time I enjoyed him, perhaps because I tend not to cross his path — his path to emptiness — and my respect to him now becomes lucid, sadly after his recent death.

The erosion of human soul, the decay of virtues, and the unending search for purpose and existence, Bergman speaks for us: these are nonsense. As I walk my way out of the theatre now filled with silent cries and elusive whispers, the thought of Alexander imagining the death of his stepfather through a fire that burnt him to death still haunts me. And from that door, as if our souls are clearly everywhere, I see Bergman staring at our faces, our wrinkled faces, and studying how they suffered from his film. He is smiling and for a moment I hear myself mumble, What an honor just to see him here. * * * * *

Original Title: Das Leben der Anderen
Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Cast: Ulrich Mühe, Martina Gedeck, Sebastian Koch
2006 Oscar Winner for Best Foreign Language Film

A film that defies seismic meters, The Lives of Others feels like an earthquake — a sudden release of energy that accumulated through time, the end of all abstinence, a massive cause of displacement that promises its return for indeterminable years. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s debut work carries us into disbelief and dementia, a period of wakefulness in dreams, and leaves us nothing to give but admiration. The applause soon before the credits rolled is very much deserved.

Its seriousness is frightening yet it manages to pull off its occasional humor, and at times even its humor is scary. The atmosphere exudes a breath of terror: one can feel the political turmoil, the tumultuous plight of the characters without seeing it. Donnersmarck masters the language of the unseen — the words, the music, the plot devices — and carefully weaves its story into a thrilling yet rewarding series of events that followed Christa-Maria’s treachery into a finality that grieves with kindness and reciprocation.

The controversy that surrounds the film prior to its release in Germany — the libel suits, the said unrealistic portrait of East Germany, and “making the Stasi man into a hero” — just adds to its vitality. Its emotional texture, as one writer puts it, is layered in such a way that it evokes universality, that these events are not alien to us, to our emotions, and to our sensibilities. In fact when Wiesler enters Dreyman’s apartment with the State Security team to install surveillance microphones and cameras, I shriek at the idea on how GMA got wiretapped, unknowingly, or if it is even possible for our state-sponsored departments to do that. We might not even need one, as big-time crooks and shameless alligators are doing all their crimes comfortably, without guilt or apprehension, in a state of evil grace. The grimness of a totalitarian government seeps through in every vein of this film: its force to let everyone succumb to its will and its dedication to power are deafening. In a brilliant scene when Dreyman walks out of a stage play and sees the Minister — “It’s a pity that a man like you once ruled a country” — and in return, he mocks, in a bleak wing of despair, the society that they have been into, in total rejection of the regime and separation, is this what they really want?

Ulrich Mühe deserves every praise he receives for his role as Stasi agent HGW XX/7: his stature, his voice that demands authority when he interrogates Christa about the typewriter that Dreyman used for the suicide article, writing her testimony as if he doesn’t know what she is saying, as if his pen has a life of its own and a conviction of a boar, his unblinking eyes filled with remorse, his threatening silence, and when he gets demoted as a mailman we weep in compassion, but as the film ends with a freeze frame of him standing in a bookshop saying that the book need not be giftwrapped because it’s for him, a sudden train of thought rushes through, while my heart still enjoys its stay in my throat: nothing could be more rewarding than that. * * * *