The film closes with a macabre dance of death in which the knight and his companions are all led away against a darkening sky. In the end, predictably, Death checkmates the knight. Death pursues the Knight relentlessly, and, in the hope to buy time so that he may do at least one good deed that will give his life some meaning, the knight invites Death to a game of chess, which then plays out over the duration of the film. The plague is sweeping across medieval Europe, and a knight and his squire, just returned from the Crusades to desolate Sweden, search for God but find nothing but emptiness and terror. The Seventh Seal is a grim narrative of that apocalyptic moment in man’s history when life on earth seems on the point of extinction. Photo: Screengrab via Svensk Filmindustri Wild Strawberries was released in December 1957, just a few months after another Ingmar Bergman classic, The Seventh Seal (which had opened in February the same year), but it is not easy to think of two films so unlike one another in tone and flavour.ĭeath and the knight choose sides for the chess game. His face glows as he dreams of his childhood. He dreams again of his childhood, full in the smile of the sun and the sea. His steely coldness, which perhaps has fed into his life-long loneliness, slowly falls away from him. The lines on his face soften, become gentler. Now that he knows he has little of it left, time begins to assume a new meaning for him. But the long journey through a tranquil, often incredibly beautiful countryside, in the company of a daughter-in-law to whom he has been lukewarm at best, transports him from emptiness and ennui to a coming-to-terms with life and its disappointments, heartbreaks and imperfections. The honour means scarcely anything to him now, for he knows he will soon be dead. This distance between death and life the old man traverses over the film’s 90 minutes, as he drives from Stockholm to Lund to receive an honorary university degree, now awake, now lost in a reverie, now reliving in his mind the pain of a broken relationship. In the second, Isak Borge, the 78-year-old celebrated man of science, goes back in his distant childhood to a sun-drenched day by the sea.
Upon the first, a nightmare, falls the shadow of death and the meaninglessness of time. Wild Strawberries begins with a dream and ends with another.
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