fanny och alexander

You love TV so you might love Fanny and Alexander. We talked about it on chat. It's so beautiful, and there are four episodes. I think they're each about 70 minutes? I'm not totally sure. There's also a truncated movie version which loses all the best parts in my opinion, although it's still good but don't watch that one first. Or I guess you could. It's your life.

The story is that Fanny and Alexander are the children of some theater people in Sweden. When their actor father dies, their mom gets really lonely and marries the bishop that's been on her since her husband's death. So the kids go from a jubilant happy rich red colorful dramatic and loving house with giggling servants and lots of children to a big cold stark white walled stone house with mean servants and a creepy dying aunt and no children, only ghosts. The bishop is mean, the mom realizes her mistake, and wants a divorce but the bishop refuses. He is so terrible! So the mom's first mother in law has been having an affair forever with a Jewish puppeteer named Isak and he uses magic to hide the children in a trunk that he buys from the bishop. Then the mom doses the bishop with sleeping pills and makes her escape. Finally she returns to the theater. The important parts of this movie are the ghosts. The dead father, the bishop's dead children, there are others I think, not to mention the character of Ishmael, who is Isak's nephew (although the character is played by a woman, which could also be a theater reference, right?) and is locked up in the puppetshop and is dangerous but the danger is that he can make people see the future. One of the dead father's brothers is a charming, windbag philanderer and the other is a whiner with a German wife who he's so mean to. The matriarch of the dead father's family is a former actress and super rich, I guess they're all superrich. Sweden, 1907. So interesting. I wonder if everything really was as red as it is in this movie. I love the theater parts. I love how when the father dies, he's performing as the ghost in Hamlet. So much to love.