Fanny och Alexander (1982)

(On Cable TV, April 2018) There may have been dragons, aliens, global conspiracies and vampires in Fanny och Alexander but I’ll never know because it seemed that I slept a thousand nights during the film’s running time and yet things never seemed to change. This is director Ingmar Bergman reflecting upon his childhood in a small Swedish village, and so you can imagine that the film is low on spectacle—while there’s some heavy drama involving kids being abused by their step-father, and someone being burned alive in an attempt to escape, the film spends far more time creating an atmosphere (most notably around a rather lovely Christmas celebration). To be fair, there are ghosts and nudity and violence here, but most of them come rather late in a duration time for more than three hours—at which point I simply didn’t care about much else than making it to the end of Fanny och Alexander even through brief comatic episodes. So it goes when I’m placed in front of much European art-house stuff—I’m easily bored.