Monday, October 10, 2005

Fanny & Alexander

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I spent all afternoon yesterday cleaning my room (I know - what an exciting life I lead) and then plopped down and spent all night watching Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander... and I do mean all night. God, it's long. But it'd been sitting on my shelf for three weeks and I knew I had to get to it eventually...

It really is the masterpiece it's hailed to be. You watch a film like this and it makes you wonder where the filmmakers have gone who can make a film like this. At once intimate and epic, spanning only a couple of years at most but encompassing so many ideas...

What really got me, though, was how scary the scenes towards the end were. One in particular, where Alexander is sneaking around the cluttered apartment of his grandmother's theater friend and is confronted by God himself... it made the hairs on my neck stand straight. And the scene may just be the moment the entire film is leading to, in which a boy's faith has been consistently battered and his questions of if there is a God are finally answered... with a cruel joke.

It's a great film, but one you really need to dedicate yourself to watch. Not for the casual viewing experience, that's for sure. But very much worth devoting the time and energy to.

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