Acceptance

With our visit to the UK and environs looming I've finally been catching up on the DVDs we brought back with us last December. This has been a most enjoyable process, particularly since the Jeeves and Wooster series (Fry & Laurie) has featured prominently. I'm now on series three, the first three episodes of which are set in New York, and this is the stuff I've never seen before - very much worth waiting for, I must say.

And then on Friday we embarked on Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, which if I were forced to make one of those silly lists of my top ten favourite movies would be likely to feature at number one. We're now up to Act 4, with the children having just arrived at the bishop's house/palace and Noi was almost demanding to keep watching late last night as she desperately needed to know what happens to them. Great story-telling.

So what makes Fanny and Alexander so good? I can think of four obvious things. First off, it's gorgeous to look at. You could freeze almost any frame and have something you wouldn't mind hanging on a wall. Beautifully composed, yet it genuinely moves in filmic terms. Whilst this is more obviously the case for the first act of he Ekdahls' Christmas, it remains true of the later more austere scenes at the bishop's. Secondly, the acting is wonderful. So much is done with so little - extreme close-ups, sparingly yet dramatically employed, convey the puzzling depths of the characters. These people look authentically like they are living and thinking at the turn of the nineteenth century. Physically in terms of gesture, stance there isn't a note out of place. Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, the story in itself is so powerfully engaging. It has an archetypal force - the Hamlet subtext, the warmth of the Ekdahls set against the chill of the bishop - that it wears close to the surface but which never lacks in subtlety. Finally, the whole experience is encompassed within a sense of tolerance and humanity that is deeply touching.

Unlikely as it seems, I can see something in common between Wodehouse and Bergman, and it's this: an acceptance of human folly that rises to a kind of sublime charity.