Life is mechanical and predictable. You come to
this world, you grow up, youth passes by, get an education and a job or a ‘dream’
career, leave middle age behind, retire, get old and contract some diseases –
then die.
Perhaps in the very beginning, ‘Dreams’ {1955} the
15th film by Ingmar
Bergman, relates the mechanicalness of life to the tick-tock of a clock. It
also symbolizes that like time, life ticks away. Meanwhile between on and off
of life, a series of anecdotes are experienced.
The work portrays men as weak and the women
suffer. It also shows people trying to escape from their present existence to
form newer relationships, if not in reality then through their dreams and
fantasies, resulting in failure and humiliation.
Ultimately people make the best of their
situations and continue to exist.
One can’t live on dreams - you have to scurry
back to reality.
Here is another slice of life by Ingmar Bergman.
