Briefly, a movie I love:  Ingmar Bergman's The Magician

Made after The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, and before his “God’s Silence Trilogy,” it’s one of Bergman’s smartest, cleverest and uniquely toned films (so far that I can say). Dreamy and sad and beautiful and wonderfully weird, it's also disarmingly funny. 

A personal picture for Bergman,  this is a film about a magician, yes, but it’s also a film about art, science, audience and criticism with Bergman firmly on the side of the artist. Max Von Sydow's magician is played powerfully, so mysteriously — with inner complications. He doesn’t speak for nearly an hour into the picture. His Albert Vogler is a tired, morose miracle man wearing a Rasputin-looking wig and a fake beard. He travels with his troupe, including his wife, posing as a boy (an enchanting Ingrid Thulin).

Summoned by officials in town to show his act, and expose himself and his snake oil salesmen ways, most specifically by a scientist, the minister of health (played by Gunnar Björnstrand), Vogler will turn the tables in a scary, though darkly humorous moment involving a dead body (his, just watch and you will see). Bibi Andersson appears as a “lusty” servant girl, but she (and Bergman) make her more than just that. It’s all spellbinding – it's contemplating truth and how we should process it, whether through shadowy unreality, or cold hard facts.

But back to the personal — in Bergman’s memoir, “Images,” he openly discusses the intent to create as he called it,  “a malicious portrait.” According to Bergman, the film was born out of taking “small revenge on Harry Schein.” Harry Schein was a movie critic and Ingrid Thulin’s husband, and Bergman, annoyed that  Schein advised Thulin to quit acting, admitted to modeling the health official on him.

So I think — Thulin to quit acting? Who can blame Bergman? Bergman also stated that the sleazy manager of the troupe (played by Åke Fridell) was him — Bergman. Bergman wrote: “if Vogler is the magician, who, even though he is tired to death, keeps repeating his by now meaningless hocus-pocus, then Tubal is the exploiter, the salesman of art. Tubal is Bergman, the director, trying to convince Dymling, the head of the studio, of the usefulness and quality of his latest film. In front of extremely skeptical studio executives, I managed to sell the face (also the title) as a hell of an erotic comedy.”

This is some kind of different erotic comedy.