This being the first Bergman film I have seen, "Wild Strawberries" left me very intrigued needing to know more about his style and technique by exploring his other films. From this film though I can tell that Bergman's directing style is something that is not so ordinary. He's very subtle and realistic with his story telling, and it lays a nice contrast with the depth and imagination of his characters that lets him express more of a formalistic style. In my opinion this is something to be admired because he creates and contains a film with diversity based out of very different styles and themes while telling the actual external story in a realistic manner. This some how manipulated my mind as if I was going crazy with his visions in the story because everything else was so realistic. He pulls this off by matching the cinematography of the main character's (Isak) "real life" and dreams to look the same, which matches the age and blandness of Isak's life.
Bergman played around with the idea of dreams in this film. The indecisiveness of the characters is similar to when one is first woken up from a dream. For example; his wife hesitates cheating on him, Marianne and Evald are happy one minute and fighting the next, Marianne despises Isak and then admires him. There is much unsettledness in whether the characters have made up their minds. I think Bergman is playing around with the viewers mind much like humans go about with reasoning with odd dreams. He takes these twists to his advantage when it comes to the Mise en Scene. He gets to express great diversity of design in the different scenarios, and each of these take place in very different settings so the movie as a whole goes through different ages and eras of Mise en Scene. His childhood is very bright, floral, and organic with the photography being very wide, bright, and open to fit the landscape and lifestyle. His adult life is more bland and domesticated by himself and the people around him.
