To honor his debt to the early Swedish cinema and the oneiric quality of its nature cinematography, Ingmar Bergman cast the silent film director and actor Victor Sjöström as the aging pedant Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries. The film unites two strands in Bergman's work: here, the examination of male vanity finds its apex, and the protagonist is introduced to a severe comeuppance in the face of death. As usual, Bergman does it with mirrors, and with dreams, which are the mind's mirror. Interestingly, the film's Dali/Kafkaesque dream sequences have proved less memorable than the scenes in which natural settings are brilliantly transformed into dreamscapes by virtue of their flashback context. Borg dreams his own death, revisits his youth as a spectator, and learns amid the forgiving wild strawberries (symbolic in Sweden of a favorite spot or sanctuary) that he has always denied desire.