Faro Document 1979 (1979)

Once again, not rated.  But this one has some nudity almost thrown in without purpose.  Oh, and if you think that Bergman got all of that animal slaughter out of his system with the first movie, this one somehow gets a little bit worse.  I don't know why slaughtering a sheep seems less horrible than slaughtering a pig, but we watch the pig die in this one.  

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Do you know what I don't want to write about when I have too much to write?  I mean, if you guessed a follow-up to a regional documentary that I just had a hard time writing up, you'd be right.  I mean, I struggled to give what little content I could for the first Faro Document.  That was an uphill battle.  It was pulling teeth.  I didn't want it to be.  But now I have three more blogs to write today and I have to find a billion words to say about a movie that I basically covered.  I can't promise that this blog will have anything genius to contribute.  If I am covering a lot of the same stuff, it's because Bergman is covering a lot of the same stuff...

...only longer.

Yeah, the movie is longer.  I know that I watched Louis Malle's Phantom India and found it riveting.  But it's almost like Bergman is stressing that, as much as things change, things really stay the same.  The movie ends with Bergman saying that there was going to be a Faro Document 1989, which inevitably did not happen.  I'm going to go with "No offense, but that's okay."  Faro Document 1979, while being a perfectly fine documentary about the residents of Faro, beats a little bit of a dead horse.  I'm surprised actually that I didn't see the movie literally beat a dead horse because that would be in vein with what the movie already presents.  It's not that the people of Faro don't deserve the attention that Bergman is bringing to them.  The life of a farmer on a remote island in Sweden is hard.  I get that.  It ages people terribly.  But also, maybe have a bit more new stuff.  I know that the films were initially released a decade apart.  It's the conceit of the documentaries.  But I watched both of them over the course of a week and change.  It was just the same thing over again.

But the thing that 1979 does add to the narrative is the element of aging.  One of the cooler moments in the original Faro Document was the smash cut to the kids on the bus. (I remember writing about that.  Do you know why?  It's because I just wrote about it this week.) Well, while the kids were in bright color in the first documentary to juxtapose the vibrant youth and joie de vivre of the children to the monochromatic fuddy duddy elders of Faro, now the kids were in black-and-white.  I liked this sequence a lot.  Honestly, had Bergman decided to do a short film following what happened to those kids, kind of like Seven Up.  The key idea behind Bergman's documentation of Faro was the idea that Faro seems to breed its own.  While some of those kids made good on their promises to leave Faro, many of those kids who swore that they'd beat it ended up being tied to the town.  Sometimes the kids didn't mind being stuck there.  Some of them seemed depressed by the notion.  But even the kids who did leave seem to have meh jobs.

This is me coming across as very judgy.  I just retook my Myers-Briggs test and I'm still an ENFJ.  I always said that I put the "J" in ENFJ.  (The result was actually shocking was that I was only slightly more J than the alternative.) I'm trying to align with what Bergman is getting across in this sequence.  There were a bunch of kids who got off Faro.  But even these kids when they grew up didn't seem to travel far.  They had jobs like train conductor and things like that.  Why I'm crapping all over what is a completely noble profession is that I can't help but notice that none of these kids grew up to be involved in the humanities.  There weren't any artists.  They were incredibly practical jobs.  My take on this is the fact that everyone on Faro is almost wired to be a practical part of society. 

Faro is an island of farmers.  The teachers that are highlighted in the film seem frustrated that they are only able to manipulate the system so far for basic supplies for teaching. There's something wired into the children from early on that jobs are the most important thing and the only real jobs tend to be farms that tend to be in the family for generations.  (There was one part that I didn't quite understand where the government, under Socialism, gave the farm to another family yet it still had to be tended.  Before all the right wingers say "See, told you!", I just don't know enough about the rules or laws in 1979 Sweden to come down hard in any direction.) Maybe it's the fact that I'm constantly talking about the American Dream in my American lit courses, but the notion that you can be anything in Faro is almost an absurdity.

With the themes of aging dancing throughout, the movie --either intentionally or no --shows how rough aging in Faro really is.  I'm definitely writing this from 2024 America in an era where Millennials are aging gracefully (you're welcome!), but there wasn't anyone who looked middle aged.  It was either young people with bad moustaches (who I would have paid dollars to donuts to guess that he was a hipster if it wasn't for the farm he was running behind him) or the most elderly person that you've ever seen.  That's the world of Faro.  And Bergman is oddly celebrating them in this movie.  The first film had Bergman weave in the message of the Social Democrats into the movie.  Only one person really talks politics in this one and it isn't pro-Social Democrat.  

It's almost like Bergman is appreciating the fact that this is a hard life to live.  Yeah, I would really have preferred not to watch the pig get slaughtered, especially when it came to having to break the pig's feet off.   Oh, I didn't love the cutting off of the hooves either, but that's something distracting.  You can see why a job like this ages someone. It's grueling work.  Perhaps the reason that I don't see the most elderly people in the world is because I live in the suburbs and I don't smoke.  But this is a place where there are very few happy outlets.  I am glad that Bergman highlighted a dance that everyone wet to.  Bergman is not ignorant of the specific kind of fun that the people of Faro indulge in.  After all, that DJ was competing with a bird's nest above his head. But that kind of life only offers so many outlets.

This is probably how much I can write.  Like the first Faro Document, there's only so much to say that can have any degree of depth.  Bergman is madly in love with Faro.  As part of that, it is an attempt to bond with the people of Faro in an intimate way.  But Faro Document 1979 doesn't offer much beyond the notion that Faro will forever stay the way it is, despite the passage of time.  I'm actually going to be stopping over in Sweden this summer.  As meh as I am about Faro Document 1979, I do want to see what has become of Faro.  Sure, I could Google it to see if Faro is still a popular tourism spot.  I am curious to see if a Hyatt or something has been built on the island.  For all I know,  that bridge that they were talking about in the first one has been raised.  But in terms of wanting to watch more Faro Documents, I'm good.

Like, really.  I'm good.  Don't go through Bergman's stuff.  I don't need a surprise third entry.