I did not see the Five-Hour Version, which may well explain my disappointment in the last part of the movie. The first half of the movie was very good, in that it seemed historically accurate about life in 1907 Uppsala. Fanny and Alexander were the children of an upper class father. It is so refreshing to see movies from the best, because nowadays filmmakers jazz movies up so much that in the end the movie is ahistorical .
My biggest disappointment was after the father, a successful actor, passed away. This is claimed to be Bergman's most autobiographical film. If so, he comes off as a self indulgent whiner. The movie turned into a Swedish version of Jane Eyre. I liked Bronte's book, but I thought she went overboard in caricturizing the male priest who ran the school Jane Eyre went to. In the zeal to indict all religion and all authority in the 19th and early 20th Century, authors often went too far.
This was the problem with the bishop that the mother married right after her husband passed away. She remarried literally days after his passing, and then claimed that she was ready for a committed relationship. The bishop was portrayed as a psychopath for merely wanting to remove stuffed toys from eight or nine year old kids, Fanny and Alexander. Then, Bergman engages in surrealistic fantasy. It would have been okay if that was what the movie was presented as from the beginning. It got very confusing towards the end, and I think that a better endung would have been not so dramatic as that the bishop dies under intricate circumstances. Show the boy at Age 30 still torn and confused about what to feel about his step father. Was his step father too strict, because he was teaching his step children how to survive as adults, or was he just a self centered sadist. That would have made this an outstanding movie.
My biggest disappointment was after the father, a successful actor, passed away. This is claimed to be Bergman's most autobiographical film. If so, he comes off as a self indulgent whiner. The movie turned into a Swedish version of Jane Eyre. I liked Bronte's book, but I thought she went overboard in caricturizing the male priest who ran the school Jane Eyre went to. In the zeal to indict all religion and all authority in the 19th and early 20th Century, authors often went too far.
This was the problem with the bishop that the mother married right after her husband passed away. She remarried literally days after his passing, and then claimed that she was ready for a committed relationship. The bishop was portrayed as a psychopath for merely wanting to remove stuffed toys from eight or nine year old kids, Fanny and Alexander. Then, Bergman engages in surrealistic fantasy. It would have been okay if that was what the movie was presented as from the beginning. It got very confusing towards the end, and I think that a better endung would have been not so dramatic as that the bishop dies under intricate circumstances. Show the boy at Age 30 still torn and confused about what to feel about his step father. Was his step father too strict, because he was teaching his step children how to survive as adults, or was he just a self centered sadist. That would have made this an outstanding movie.