3 - The Journey: The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries

Summary

Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal both recount a “final” journey by their central characters. It is a trip from one place to another, occupying a single very long day (approximately dawn to dawn). But in fact what appears to be linear is part of a more complicated journey that in essence starts at home, wanders far away, and finally returns to where it began. It is this last stage that we see. For Bergman, this represents a central task of adult life to return to one's past and in some way retrieve something essential in life that has been lost. It is in this return that we find our second chance.

For knight Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal this would be to restore his marriage, but his time is up, and he can only rejoin his wife to await their end together. Still, he can save someone else (the juggler Jof and his wife, Mia) and thus replace his own salvation with that of another, a partial fulfillment of this essential project of return and reappropriation. Aged physician-professor Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries cannot save his marriage, since his wife has been long dead and their rupture is thus irreparable. But he can substitute his son's marriage and home for his own, becoming a true father again to his children (and grandchild). Moreover, in returning to his childhood home, he comes to feel once more alive so that at least he won't die dead. Wild Strawberries, then, is a drama of rebirth (mercy and meaning) through both reappropriation and replacement of what has been lost, whereas The Seventh Seal achieves only the latter.