Customer Reviews

Sunday's Children [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sunday's Children is one of the most insightful films about parent/child relations I have ever seen. The camera follows the activities of Pu, a young Sweedish boy vacationing in the country with his family. Pu's father is a minister who is struggling to make sense of his life and reconcile with his wife, who finds it increasingly difficult to live with him.

Pu is an especially observant child who sees and feels the suffering of people and animals and thinks God must be wicked to allow so many terrible things to happen in this world. In one scene Pu watches as a farmer bludgeons to death his calf with a large ax. Scenes like this are painful to watch as are Pu's often strained relations with his family.

Pu decides to travel with his father to church for the Sunday services. On the ferry Pu is sitting on the edge of the boat and his father discovers him there and slaps him several times across the face because Pu has put himself in danger. We know what both father and son are feeling and we know they are both right for being upset. This one example demonstrates how complicated this film is and also how truthful it is.

We find no easy answers in Sunday's Children. Life is full of suffering and some of the pain comes from our illusions about how our parents should behave toward us. Pu blames his father for some of his unhappiness, both as a child and then later as an adult. The viewer knows that Pu is not wrong, but he is not right either. Pity and compassion are independent of right and wrong and simply allow us to empathize with the suffering we see in other people. In the end Pu's father is dying and Pu is unable to forget the past and forgive in the present.

Sunday's Children goes far beyond entertainment. It is cinema verite that holds a mirror up to life and let's us see a bit of the truth about ourselves and our own families. The truth that this film illustrates is that as we want to be forgiven, so must we be willing to forgive.

Many viewers who have not seen Bergman's Fanny and Alexander will find that film equally disturbing and fascinating.

This beautiful evocative film was taken from a written text by Ingmar Bergman, and filmed perfectly by his director son Daniel and long-time cinematographer Sven Nykvist. It really amounts to a final Bergman film, and as such, it deserves an excellent Criterion DVD release.

So many vastly inferior, C-list films are available on DVD, why is one of Bergman's best movies, indeed, ANY Bergman movie, not out on DVD?! This is enexcusable.

An enjoyable movie about Swedish family life in the early part of the 1900's. The time shifts to Pu's adulthood were a little confusing for me, but that is probably because I was more interested in Pu's story as a child.