INGMAR BERGMAN'S 'FANNY AND ALEXANDER'

By VINCENT CANBY Published: June 17, 1983, Friday EVEN as you watch Ingmar Bergman's new film, ''Fanny and Alexander,'' it has that quality of enchantment that usually attaches only to the best movies in retrospect, long after you've seen them, when they've been absorbed into the memory to seem sweeter, wiser, more magical than anything ever does in its own time. This immediate resonance is the distinguishing feature of this superb film, which is both quintessential Bergman and unlike anything else he has ever done before. ''Fanny and Alexander'' is a big, dark, beautiful, generous, family chronicle, which touches on many of the themes from earlier films while introducing something that, in Bergman, might pass for serenity. It moves between the worlds of reality and imagination with the effortlessness characteristic of great fiction as it tells the story of the quite marvelous Ekdahl family. The time is 1907, and the setting is the provincial city of Uppsala. The Ekdahls represent all that is most civilized about the upper middle classes. The source of their money is commerce, but art is the center of their lives. Long before the start of the film, Oscar Ekdahl, a wealthy businessman, fell in love with and married Helena Mandelbaum, a beautiful stage actress, and built a theater for her in Uppsala. When the film opens on Christmas Eve, the Ekdahl family is gathering for its annual holiday rituals. Helena, now old but still beautiful and a woman of great style, faces the festivities with less joy than usual. She's beginning to feel her age, and various members of the family worry her. Her eldest son, Oscar, who now manages the theater and whose wife, Emilie, is its star, is not looking well. Even though he's not a good actor, she notes dryly, he is insisting on playing the ghost in their new prouction of ''Hamlet.'' Her second son, Carl, is a self-pitying failure, a professor, who hates his career and loathes his servile, German-born wife. The youngest son, Gustav Adolf, is a bon vivant, a successful restaurateur with a pretty wife, who loves him dearly and finds his alliances with chambermaids only natural, in view of his inexhaustible sexual appetites.

Among the grandchildren, Helena's favorites are Alexander, who is a very solemn, sage 10, and Fanny, several years Alexander's junior, who are the children of Oscar and Emilie. Also virtually a member of the household is Isak Jacobi, a well-to-do antiques dealer and money lender who, years ago, was Helena's lover and, later, her husband's best friend. Time, in this film, is as soothing as it is relentless. ''Fanny and Alexander'' follows the fortunes of the Ekdahl family for a little more than one tumultuous year, during which the ailing Oscar dies of a stroke and the newly widowed Emilie marries the local Bishop, a stern, handsome prelate of the sort who preaches ''love of truth'' and whose severity his women parishoners find immensely erotic. Though most of the film is seen through the eyes of Alexander, all of ''Fanny and Alexander'' has the quality of something recalled from a distance - events remembered either as they were experienced or as they are imagined to have happened. In this fashion Mr. Bergman succeeds in blending fact and fantasy in ways that never deny what we in the audience take to be truth. ''Fanny and Alexander'' has the manner of a long, richly detailed tale being related by someone who acknowledges all of the terrors of life without finding in those terrors reason enough to deny life's pleasures. ''It is necessary and not in the least bit shameful,'' a slightly drunk Gustav Adolf says in the film's final, joyous sequence, ''to take pleasure in the little world - good food, gentle smiles, fruit trees in bloom, waltzes.'' This happy occasion is the banquet celebrating the joint christening of his illegitimate daughter by the pretty chambermaid named Maj and Emilie's new daughter by the Bishop. Says Gustav Adolf: ''Let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind and generous and affectionate and good.'' There are repeated references in ''Fanny and Alexander'' to this ''little world,'' which in the film refers to the Ekdahl's theater, a place of melodrama, comedy, dreams, magic and moral order, in contrast to the increasing chaos of life outside. The world of ''Fanny and Alexander'' also has its share of melodrama and comedy and magic and, finally, of moral order as it might be perceived by a teller of fairy tales.

The film's most riveting sequences are those that recount the unhappy adventures of Emilie, when at the request of her new husband, she takes Fanny and Alexander to live in the Bishop's palace, carrying with them no possessions except the clothes they wear on their backs. The Bishop's palace is a great, terrifying prison, a bleak mausoleum dominated by the scolding presences of the Bishop's mother and unmarried sister and haunted by the ghosts of the Bishop's dead wife and two dead daughters. How Fanny and Alexander are eventually rescued, and how the Bishop meets his come-uppance, are among the most wondrous scenes Mr. Bergman has ever realized. There's also an extraordinary sequence set in Isak's cluttered antiques shop where Fanny and Alexander are hidden after their rescue, especially a scene, set in the middle of the night, in which Alexander is convinced he's having a philosophical discourse with God. In contrast are the exuberant Ekdahl family get-togethers, the love scenes, the moments of intimacy between Helena and old Isak. The ghost of the dead Oscar turns up frequently, sometimes just looking tired, sometimes worried about the way things are going. In one beautiful moment, Helena, alone in her summer house in the country, looks up to see Oscar watching her. Holding his hand in hers, she says with infinite, sweet sadness: ''I remember your hand as a boy. It was small and firm and dry.'' The members of the huge cast are uniformly excellent, most particularly Gunn Wallgren, as Helena; Ewa Frolong, who looks a lot like a young Liv Ullmann, as Emilie; Jan Malmjo, as the tyrannical Bishop, the character that, Mr. Bergman says, he most identifies with; Jarl Kulle, as the life-loving Gustav Adolf; Allan Edwell, as Oscar, both living and dead; Borje Ahlstedt, as Carl; Erland Josephson, as Isak; Harriet Andersson, as a ferocious maid who tends the children at the bishop's palace; Pernilla Wallgren, as Gustav Adolf's saucy mistress, and, of course, Bertil Guve, the remarkable young boy who plays Alexander, and Pernilla Allwin, who plays Fanny. ''Fanny and Alexander,'' which opens today at the Cinema I and Cinema 3, is still another triumph in the career of one of our greatest living film makers.

The 'Little World' FANNY & ALEXANDER, direction and script (Swedish with English subtitles) by

Ingmar Bergman; cinematographer, Sven Nykvist; edited by Sylvia Ingemarsson; music by Daniel Bell, Benjamin Britten, Frans Helmerson, Robert Schumann and Marianne Jacobs; production company, Cinematograph AB for the Swedish Film Institute, the Swedish Television SVT 1, Sweden, Gaumont, France, Personafilm and Tobis Filmkunst, BRD; released by Embassy Pictures. At Cinema I, Third Avenue and 60th Street and Cinema 3, at the Plaza. Running time: 190 minutes. Fanny Ekdahl . . . . . Pernilla Allwin Alexander Ekdahl . . . . . Bertil Guve Carl Ekdahl . . . . . Borje Ahlstedt Justina . . . . . Harriet Andersson Aron . . . . . Mats Bergman Filip Landahl . . . . . Gunnar Bjornstrand Oscar Ekdahl . . . . . Allan Edwall Ismael . . . . . Stina Ekblad Emilie Ekdahl . . . . . Ewa Froling Isak Jacobi . . . . . Erland Josephson Gustav Adolf Ekdahl . . . . . Jarl Kulle Aunt Emma . . . . . Kabi Laretei Alma Ekdahl . . . . . Mona Malm Bishop Edvard Vergerus . . . . . Jan Malmsjo Lydia Ekdahl . . . . . Christina Schollin Helena Ekdahl . . . . . Gunn Wallgren Maj . . . . . Pernilla Wallgren