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Fanny och Alexander (1982)
Family through Bergman's eyes
28 April 2022
- Although the film was made in the 80s of the last century, the plot of this film by Ingmar Bergman is set in the early 20th century in which the central figure are two children Fanny and Alexander who grow up in a large and cheerful family named Ekdahl. Their life is carefree and fulfilled, the house is always full, their family is rich, and every opportunity is used to celebrate something and have fun. Problems arise when their father dies and their mother remarries. Their stepfather is a strict, authoritarian priest who thinks well, but is absolutely incapable of understanding the feelings of others. Bergman presents him as his own father, who was also a priest and highly authoritative, which was a characteristic of a traditional and patriarchal family from that time. However, in this film, Helena is presented as a pillar of the family, who is the matriarch of this family and who takes care of everything, but still a fragile woman who finds solace in her old lover and friend Isaac Jacob.
- The plot of the film and the characters are very intertwined, which shows the diversity of the characters of such a large family. Helena has three children who are the complete opposite: Gustav Adolf, who is an eccentric and a lover whose affair with the young maid Maj is seen through the fingers because his wife Alma accepts him as he is; Carl is a sad and unhappy man, a failed professor, but he is lucky because his wife is full of understanding and he can always open up to her; and Oscar who runs a family theater, his marriage is filled with love and he has two children, Fanny and Alexander. The family portrait is given mainly through the eyes of young Alexander, and the wide range of emotions that Alexander experiences during the film can be divided into 3 segments. In the 1st part, children's carelessness and happiness prevail when the family is together and surrounded by other children, in the 2nd part the misfortune and suffering he experiences because of his authoritative stepfather, and in the 3rd part the viewer experiences the child's mysticism and imagination with Alexander in the old Jacob Art Gallery. We experience these different emotions the way Alexander experiences them, so we can't help but feel the joy he feels and get scared when his stepfather scares him. We can see the temptations and troubles of a family that is caring but broken, they are a real family because they love and care for each other, but they also have their differences, they quarrel with each other and they are very flawed.
- In this film, Bergman may be a bit cruel to his younger protagonists (Alexander serves as Bergman's alter ego in this film and he and the character share similar experiences), but not because of foreign experiences that have to pass, but because of theirs, such as for example, Alexander's sudden realization of the gloom and futility of the afterlife after the death of his father. This film is set between places where children take on the attributes of adults, where imagination becomes a weapon of the mind when embracing that mystical time in young life. Framing his magical realism within the structure of a broadly emotional theatrical family viewed from the perspective of an awake boy with a vivid imagination, Fanny and Alexander offers us an insight into the formative influences of the Ekdahl family.
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The Swedish Theory of Love (2015)
Ideal modern family?!
28 April 2022 - 0 out of 1 users found this review helpful.
- At the international level, Sweden is seen as a perfect society, a model and a symbol of the highest achievements of human progress. The Swedish theory of love digs into the true nature of the Swedish lifestyle, exploring the existential black holes of a society that has created the most independent people in the world. The Swedish Theory of Love (2015) is a documentary by director Erik Gandini that deals with the study of idealized modern and individualistic Swedish society through different frameworks and experiences. Modern Sweden is considered an advanced society with a high standard of living, but does a high standard of living directly condition the happiness of an individual? Is it possible that a completely independent society in which human contact is reduced to a minimum, in which there is a growing trend of people dying alone, in which there is an increasing number of single mothers, is one of the "happiest" countries in the world. This documentary deals with these, but also with the questions of how all this came about.
- The Swedish theory of love begins with a story about the relationship between parents and children, men and women, which shows that relationships, contact and love (any kind of love) are harmful to the freedom of the individual. For that reason, in the Nordic country, separation and radical autonomy have been advocated for decades, where individuality as liberation from the other is the only way to be free and complete. With the sexual revolution, that is, the development of the process of in vitro fertilization, a woman can get pregnant in her home by injecting sperm with a syringe, which exceeds the standard sexual act. For those women who still lack human contact during a sexual act, a virtual reality VR option is offered in which a woman can connect with her donor and get closer emotionally. On the other hand, with the rise of individualism and obsession with achieving personal goals, modern Swedish society is losing out on socialization, families are breaking up, teenagers are leaving family homes early, and the elderly are dying alone. The term "Swedish love theory" comes from a movement in the 1970s that aimed to make the Swedish people completely independent of each other. The idea was that if you didn't have to depend on someone else, it would lead to the final form of existence.
- In this documentary, Ethiopia, where Dr. Eriksen lives and works, is presented as a contrast to life in Sweden. The contrast is great, and Dr. Eriksen describes it as someone who lived in Sweden most of his life and decided to meet another world. The economic abundance of a country like Sweden and others like Ethiopia is not comparable, so we will not even deal with that topic, but that does not have to be about happiness. He describes a family in Ethiopia that is collectivist, the elderly take care of grandchildren and stay in their homes until the end of their lives, if someone is sick, the family is there to help, the worries of an average family are reduced to mere existence and thinking about basic necessities. In contrast, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that in Sweden, individualistic behavior has reduced the ability to socialize. He states that the problem is that when you reach a certain standard of living, all your existential problems disappear, society takes care of you, your bills are paid automatically, so it happens, as shown in the documentary, that a person dies and no one found about it for two years because all his bills were duly paid from the account on which he still had 100,000 euros left. When a person loses the problems he has to face, it does not make him happy, on the contrary, it leads him to direct misfortune and absolute boredom.
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Capharnaüm (2018)
Difficult socio-family relations of Capernaum
28 April 2022
- Capernaum is a difficult film that deals with the complex socio-economic problems of an underdeveloped and poor country such as Lebanon and how such a situation in the country and society affects an average family. It is brutal in its realism and will not leave anyone indifferent. The plot of the film revolves around a main character named Zain who is 12 or 13 years old (neither he knows exactly nor his parents because they have no papers and he is not reported to have been born), young but highly intelligent for his age, who fights against, poverty and destitution given to him at birth. Zain is the oldest child in his family, and the exact number of brothers and sisters is not shown to us in the film, which is what the director wants to show contradictory that in such a society, children are considered numbers. Young Zain cares most about his sister Sahra, who is about 12 years old and who is just entering puberty, but in a society where it is allowed to marry a girl who has just started getting a sexual graduation, he understands what that means. She decides to run away together with Sahra, who is not even aware of what is to come, but her parents have already arranged the marriage, and they have chosen a young man in their twenties who can help them financially. Due to the impossibility of a way to oppose his parents and that marriage, Zain decides to run away from home and then he will find out that the world he knew is even worse. He introduces a migrant woman to a baby from Ethiopia who fled illegally because of the war, whose life gets worse when she is arrested without paperwork, and young Zain decides to sell her to a man who trades people who promise him life in the western country. The baby is guaranteed by a foster family. Zain later finds out that his sister Zahra passed away due to complications related to the pregnancy, and then decides to take revenge. He stabs her sister's husband with a knife after which he is arrested and at the trial, in addition to the trial against him, he leads a counter-trial in which he sues his parents because he was born. At the end of the film, the baby is returned to its mother, the smuggler is arrested and Zain is photographed for the papers when we first time see his smile in the film.
- No one should lead this kind of life, without any social protection, but people, and unfortunately also children, live this kind of life. The director and director of the casting have just been looking for actors whose lives closely follow the background stories of the characters they play. Zain worked as a delivery man when he was only 10, and his sister in the film is a Syrian refugee who was discovered when she was selling chewing gum on the streets of Beirut. Zain's parents are so poor that they can't afford to pay the bill for his birth, which means that Zain can't get personal documents and therefore can't have a passport, receive medical care or go to school, so he is forced to work as a he would feed himself and his family. In the Middle East, marriage is directly linked to reaching sexual maturity (unlike European culture, where time and partner selection have a high degree of independent decision-making), but it also depends to a large extent on family interests and considerations. What also distinguishes this culture from the European one is the number of children in the family. In Europe, there is a tendency to reduce the number of children in order to achieve a "demographic transition", and to reduce mortality, especially child mortality, and then in the next step there is a reduction in birth rates. In Zain's family, children are numbers, they are considered a blessing, but their future is not considered. After Sahra's death, Zain's mother tells him "when God takes something from you, he blesses you in return", telling him that she is pregnant again, completely unaware of the world she is bringing her newborn into. She tells him that she hopes to be a daughter (she hopes because she knows that she has more benefits from a female child because she can marry her in 13,14 years and use her for financial gain as was the case with Sahra) to which Zain tells her that she does not have a heart and not wanting to see her, obviously aware of the situation.
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