Man this was a movie that faffed about!
It's like they couldn't make a full 90 minutes movie so they just shoot rustic servants being jolly and horny for 45 minutes to have something to film. It really feels like we have two movies here and they clash pretty garishly. There is a good movie in here but it's buried under a ton of trash.
Lies! Blasphemy! Nothing from Bergman is trash, you heathen
On the subject of "two movies" allegedly "clashing" - and "garishly," to boot - I am with
Yotsuya:
Nope, it was both a stylistic and a thematic choice giving the movie it's upstairs, downstairs -dynamic.
To cite Frank Gado's excellent book
The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, this dynamic is a recurrent structural motif throughout Bergman's work:
"The erotic revels among the servants [which seem like] irrelevant comic intrusion upon very serious themes [actually] operate as counterpoint to the tortured eroticism expressed in the upstairs bedrooms. The former, which implies an arc of life extending from the callow young lovers, through the middle-aged Tubal and the plump cook, to wise old Grandmother reassuring the youngest servant that she will experience the fullness of womanhood in her turn, is natural, uncomplicated, and joyous; the latter exhibits the suffering of sexually twisted lives. (A similar contrast, springing from the same psychological source, can be found in
Smiles of a Summer Night.)"
Consider this. In the ending. When Vogler has pulled off the most masterful con imaginable, when he has practically scared Vergerus into believing in the supernatural — what happens? In the very next scene, we see him scurrying after Vergerus and pitifully begging for payment. The power he held as a ghoul is wasted by his reality as a starving artist with the whiplash of a car-crash. All that science-vs-belief humbug means squat when you have mouths to feed. Having some cantankerous opinion on the subject is the privilege of the rich.
In line with
Yotsuya's point that this was directed by Bergman and not Marx, alternatively, in keeping with the artist theme, consider another portion of Gado's reading of this film:
"Vogler suffers profoundly, not because he is out of favor with the audience but because he wants to perform
real miracles - just as, for Bergman, the magic of art lay in its promise of changing reality. The magician who reveals that his resurrection was only an illusion is finally Bergman himself, confessing that Frid's exultant cry at the end of
Smiles of a Summer Night, the "meaningful deed" insuring continuance of hope in
The Seventh Seal, and the absolution Isak seems to attain with his last vision in
Wild Strawberries were, after all, only tricks. That he then ends this film with another Voglerian trick is anything but an expression of confidence in his artistic magic. Ironically, at the moment Bergman was being hailed as the one true genius the cinema had produced, he was entering a crisis."
Also, lol at anyone mistaking Ingrid Thulin for a male.
I often think that with Cheng Pei-pei in
Come Drink With Me, as well.
PS: Does anyone else think the ending may be a dream sequence? It suddenly switches from bitter rain to shining summer and suddenly all of the protagonists' problems are washed away by emissaries from the King. The filmmaking even radically shifts and there is a carnival-like soundtrack playing. I'm not sure just something I thought of.
Good point... I noticed the weather change from each scenes and found it odd, but didn't really put two and two together to come out with a dream sequence... I sincerely hope it wasn't!
For one more citation from Gado's book, he connects the ending of
The Magician to the ending of
Wild Strawberries:
"Once one perceives the inner similarity of Vogler's ordeal to Isak Borg's, the similarity of the "happy endings" Bergman imposes on the two films becomes apparent. Just as Isak's search for father and forgiveness ends in a dream of reconciliation, the guilt that underlies Vogler's humiliation is providentially absolved by the summons from the king - clearly a father figure. Moreover, the regeneration symbolized by the conjunction of the approaching death of Isak, who is "guilty of guilt," with the vision of Sigbritt's baby, Isak's innocent other self, also marks the ending of [
The Magician]: Vergerus's autopsy report and the king's letter bear the same date - July 14, Bergman's own birthday.
The very similarity of the two conclusions, however, calls attention to a most significant difference. Although the serenity visited on Isak conflicts with the import of the dramatic action that leads up to it, Bergman fogs the inconsistency in a sentimental cloud. In contrast, [
The Magician] flaunts the artificiality of the magician's deliverance; it is [...] "utterly fantastic" [...] Seeing no solution to his personal dilemma, [Bergman] cannot bring his fiction to a satisfactory close, [so] he invents a preposterous happy ending that mocks his despair as a man and his failure as an artist."
In short, the ending is
supposed to be strange - not because it is a dream, however, which would be an "acceptable" deviation from reality, but precisely because it is
not a dream, which foregrounds the fact that it is an "unacceptable" contrivance due to an inability on Bergman's part as the artist to deal with the reality of the film's narrative (and Bergman's personal) dilemma.
Honestly with Bergman I have tended to limit myself to a few of the major films
Out of curiosity, what are the films of his that you've seen? Also, why would you want to
limit your Bergman viewing
I've been a bit hesitant to watch the major Bergman classics
For fuck's sake, you, too,
Yotsuya? What's with you people and the imposition of Bergman viewing restrictions? Next to Kubrick and Hitchcock he's the fucking GOAT!
they tend to be about religion (I'm not so interested) and death (I'm too young to worry about).
Documentaries are where you need to actually be interested in the subject matter. Movies are about the artistic renderings of stories. And Bergman's artistic renderings of stories, whether about religion or death or whatever else, are among the greatest in film history. So start watching them!
I only remember watching the two sex comedies Smiles on a Summer Night and All Those Women past twenty years. As I'm closing 50 The Magician served as a nice intermediator between the lighter and the more serious works.
Same question as I asked
moreorless: What are the films of his that you've seen?
I starter to watch Persona few years ago but could not get very far at all as it seemed too avantgarde for my expectations which were locked in his 50's stuff. Naturally I intend to give it another shot.
Definitely give it another shot, and do it knowing that Bergman had a modernist phase from
Persona through
The Passion of Anna where he was doing a lot of Brechtian/Godardian stuff. It was all still thoroughly Bergmanesque, but the aesthetic and narrational devices were often explicitly modernist.
IMO, just like Kubrick showed up and made
The Shining and blew everyone who was making horror movies at the time out of the water, Bergman showed up and made
Persona and blew everyone who was making avant garde shit at the time out of the water