I was really looking forward to discovering Bergman's penultimate film "In the Presence of a Clown", about a professor named Carl and played by Börje Ahlstedt, the creepy and pathetic father in Bergman's final "Saraband".
That Carl was an interesting subversion of the 'mad scientist' for he is actually mad in the medical sense. The story is set in 1925 with Carl, bedridden in a mental ward. Apparently, he tried to kill his wife (Marie Richardson) and he just lays down in a sort of self-meditative and self-destructive state only fanned by his spiritual infatuation with the composer Franz Schubert.
There he meets another peculiar character, Osvald Vogler (played by the inevitable Erland Josephson), who is able to awaken a lust for existential freedom carried by the most vulgar sides of human behavior (and that includes farting). Later they work together to make the first talking movie (before Hollywood's "Jazz Singer"), relating Schubert's final hours in the company of his nurse (he died of syphilis iat the age of 28).
That sounded like a good premise, and I had set my intellect up to 10 so I could grab the expected insights on art either as a mean of expression and communion with the viewer or as a living matter in perpetual reinvention to sustain its quest for immortality (resurrecting an artist to generate a new art form). And yet for some reason I still can't figure out, I couldn't get into it. I felt as if it was some other director trying to emulate Bergman in form and content and almost succeeding at that. But something was lacking.
Some bits of dialogues are written with the delightful perversion of a man who's accumulated so much life wisdom he could indulge to some gross characterizations and let men of high intelligence act like childish pricks. Maybe it was Bergman trying to free himself from that cold and clinical façade to demonstrate that behind every artist, there's a sickness, a propensity for mental delirium that can inspire the best as much as the worst. In its core, I guess that's the idea and a pretty good one. Then again, the treatment was rather dull and frustrating.
I might be used to watch Bergman movies and even his TV films had a cinematic quality to them, this one is shot like one of these low budget TV dramas you watch on a Thursday afternoon (one reviewer mentioned telenovelas, I wish it had their brightness), the whole look of the beginning is pretty depressing, we feel like entrapped in greyish shades of depression, I was sure it would bring us to another palette of colors. Alas apart from a beautiful scene with men and women sharing some coffee next to a chimney fire, the rest is all in gloomy lime green and there was something unpleasant about it. The whole film was like waiting for a deliverance that never happened.
The two men are like some big gargoyles toying with that new invention and both share their lives with some women who are so beautiful you gotta wonder what they found in them (Lena Endre and Gunnel Fred). I couldn't believe in these couples, I could believe in the true love for Schubert because the intimate bond betweenan artist and any art was one of Bergman's major themes, style can't be dissociated from meaning, as for feelings, such things are made of quarrels, pains and cries but the whole film is talkative and yet without saying much. There's an interesting scene where Vogler's mother (Anita Bjork) talks about her son in a slow and melancholic way but to the degree that I listened carefully, I realized that I didn't care.
It all comes down to that climactic show whose series of incidents make the film statement, art is still technically demanding and like an unachieved symphony, many projects aiming for greatness miss their target but at least they tried. As the projectionist, Peter Stormare isn't given much to do with his acting talent, he's only a tool in the great creative machinery. He saves the day and extinguishes the fire but at the end, he didn't get any laurels. Artists need technicians but technicians are hardly remembered. The show went on and cinema went back to its theatrical roots and maybe, it was Bergman back to his roots himself (the film was adapted from his own play). The essence of cinema might be in that sort of spiritual communion between the art and the viewers, or at the very least the artist. But technicality matters.
I 've seen at least twenty Bergman films, only his take on comedy had disappointed me, I prefer the Bergman who challenges our thoughts but in this film he rather challenges our patience, imploring us to root for two intellectuals who are just as tired as we are and the film runs longer than most Bergman movies without being about that much.
As for the clown scene (she's played by Agneta Elkmanner), it's interesting in a very weird way and intriguing but the whole perversity of it set me off, it was certainly not meant to be beautiful or sensual and make it a sort of pervert fight between the man and the clown inside but the idea of sexualizing the clown should have been reconsidered. It didn't seem to make a specific point in the whole narrative and I'm not sure Carl was such an interesting character I was eager to dig deeper in his psyche.
Not a bad film by itself, but a subpar Bergman that only completists will dare to go through before locking it somewhere in a remote closet of their memory. I know I wouldn't if only to keep that nightmarish clown face off my memory.
