Reviews (2)

Sunday's Children holds a mirror up to life.
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.

An enjoyable movie
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. ... Read more

Amazon.com

Expectations follows six interlocking stories set in contemporary Sweden. The movie opens with an old man attempting to leap off the back of a ship. He's rescued from his suicide attempt by a young man with blond hair and tattoos named Sixten, who's returning home after many years abroad. Sixten then shares a train with a married man who strikes up an affair with a businesswoman. Sixten tries to find some common ground with his old father; elsewhere, a man on the verge of divorce struggles to connect with his young daughter. These stories and more are told with a deceptively simple economy: at first they don't seem to be about anything at all, but gradually, with the subtlest of gestures--things as casual and seemingly offhand as the young daughter rubbing cherry juice on her father's cheeks, or Sixten carrying a giant toy bear that he won at a carnival, hoping to run into a girl he'd yearned for long before--the stories start to reverberate off each other. Halfway through, the movie leaps forward six months, where everyone's lives have taken surprising turns. Inspired by Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Expectations is in some ways more successful because its turns and revelations are quieter; there's no high drama, just the small joys and sorrows of everyday existence. Directed with a sure hand by Daniel Bergman,Expectations is considerably less angst-driven than the films of hisfather, Ingmar Bergman. --Bret Fetzer ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Superb photography, riveting plots, memorable characters.
Expectations is a brilliantly produced Swedish film (with English subtitles) by Daniel Bergman, based on a screenplay by Reidar Jonsson. We see a cast of memorable characters whose lives follow there own paths but cross-connect with one another, sometimes with intimacy, sometimes as strangers sharing a common crossroad. The photography is simply superb, the storylines riveting, and the acting gifted. By film's end we have become acquainted and involved with their virtues and vices, aspirations and failures, life and death conclusions. Color, 95 minutes. ... Read more