“Everything can happen. Everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins weaving new patterns”

I put this film off for so long. After watching Ingmar Bergman’s austere and meditative films of the 1960s (notably Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1963)) and his densely psychological masterpiece Persona (1966), I felt that a three hour Bergman film, cut down from a five hour television series, might be oppressive and difficult to digest. Bergman’s minimalist and coldly philosophical films are all short and punchy – delivering his existentialism in a – if not easily digestible then swallowable – form. My trepidation was misplaced.

Fanny and Alexander (1982) is neither austere nor particularly dense.  It has a feeling of being a Bergman best-hit package – with touches of Winter Light (the chilly depiction of Christianity), The Magician (1958) (a magical realist chamber piece) and even The Seventh Seal (1957) (darkness with sudden swings towards life-affirming comedy and pageantry).

This is Bergman doing Dickens crossed with Bronte – it starts with a colourful, lively Christmas party. The title child characters are celebrating with their parents, until, following the death of the father (a theatre owner), the story slowly degrades into lifeless austerity when the mother marries a tortured and cruel bishop. Bergman starts the film with the frame filled with light and glitter and then slowly removes it until, at the crisis point of the story, Alexander is locked in a bare and dusty attic.

It’s a glorious film of the imagination – filled with ghosts, golem, magical puppets and other preternatural incursions. Far from feeling oppressed or overwhelmed by the length, I found myself wanting more. For me – it’s up there with Bergman’s best.