nothing is true
by Douglas Messerli
Ingmar Bergman script (loosely based on the play by G. K.
Chesterton, Magic) and director Ansiktet (The Magician aka The Face)
/ 1958
Ingmar
Bergman’s 1958 film, The Magician (called
The Face in Britain after the Swedish
original title Ansiktet), is both a
kind of ghost story and a comedy, but, in the end, is neither. The magician of
the title, Albert Emmanuel Vogler (Max van Sydow, sporting throughout the
film an obviously false beard and
moustache, and for inexplicable reasons pretending throughout to be mute)
travels about the late 19th-century countryside with an odd assortment of
performers, his witch-like, spellcasting mother (Naima Wifstrand), a young male
assistant (Ingrid Thulin, who is actually a woman and his wife), his talkative
publicist Tubal (Åke Fridell), and the coach driver, Simson (Lars Ekborg).
Along the way, they add to their little gathering a former actor, an alcoholic
who is near death and dies within their coach, but later mysteriously comes alive
only to fall back into his coffin.
When the troupe arrives in a small city
where they hope to perform, they are instead taken by authorities to the home
of Consul Egerman (Erland Josephson), who with the Minister of Health, Dr.
Vergerus (Gunnar Bjönstrand) who, having heard rumors of the deleterious
effects in other cities after Vogler had hypnotized some, wants to prove that
their show is both a sham and that it will not result in public panic. The
guests are put up in the Consul’s house for the night, but are fed, like
servants, in the kitchen.
The cook and
the maids quickly participate, a bit as in Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, in trysts of joyful lovemaking with
Tuball and the coach driver, while Granny Vogler signs the cross and utters
secret spells upon the walls of the house. Vogler and his wife prepare for the
next day’s performance and retire to bed, but not before the pompous and
self-assured Vergerus, discovering a beautiful woman in the place of Vogler’s
male assistant, verbally challenges her. She admits that “nothing” in their act
“is true,” and later summarizes Vogler’s magic performance:
It’s always the props and the patter that must do
the work. The clergy’s in the same sad boat. God
is silent while men babble on.
Meanwhile the Consul’s wife clearly is attracted to Vogler and
offers him a late-night visit in her bedroom, an invitation the Consul, alas,
overhears.
In short, the film, at first, appears to
be nothing more than a group of performers being challenged by a group of
bourgeois yokels, and we wonder where Bergman might be heading with his
nonetheless enjoyable story.
Yet during the
performance of the next day, strange things do indeed happen. Using the local
police-head’s wife as a subject, Vogler easily mesmerizes her, as she openly
describes to the small audience how she hates her pig-like husband and deceives
him.
Soon after,
Vogler stages his own death, immediately after which Dr. Vergerus insists upon
an autopsy in the attic. After he has completed the autopsy, Vogler reappears,
for a short while truly horrifying the nearly always skeptical and
science-dedicated doctor.
Of course, Vogler has replaced his own
body with the corpse they have brought with them, and tricked the elderly man.
And the next morning the Consul and Vergerus demand the troupe members’
arrests,insisting that Vogler had “induced a momentary fear of death, nothing
more.”
Tubal, who has
fallen love with the cook, has already declared that he intends to leave the
company, and Simson, the driver has fallen in love with Sara (Bibi Andersson).
So, it appears the company is doomed—that is until they suddenly receive a
summons by the Swedish King to perform before him!
Some critics
have speculated that the film is a kind of parable, with Vogler, who is
betrayed, dies and rises from the dead, and whose middle name means “God with
us” is a Christ figure, whose suffering is played out before the Pilate-like
Consul and deniers such as Dr. Vergerus. The consul’s servant, who hangs
himself, is a kind of Judas, while Manda is a disciple. Accordingly, his call
from the King, is a return to God the Father. Certainly, the work might be read
that way, yet that does not quite explain Vogler’s mother; obviously the
witch-like Granny cannot be Mary. And Bergman fills his film with too many
other unrelated events to allow us to so simplify its message. We must also
remember, moreover, that there are two resurrections in this work, not merely
one. And if Manda is a kind of disciple, she is also his loving wife, long
before scholars speculated that Christ might have been married to Mary
Magdalene, left alone to a cross-dressing woman. And that doesn’t even begin to
describe the “lesbian” witch of a mother who, after all, in the original Christ story claims to never had sex
with a man.
Finally, if
Manda is a strangely disloyal disciple in insisting that everything is simply a
trick or by suggesting the repudiation of belief, “nothing is true,” she is
merely speaking the truth. In this world, nothing is what it seems to be. No wonder Bergman was such an important force on my youth!
What I was
struck by in this, my second viewing of the film, is how similar it was, in
some respects, to the other innovative works of the 1950s such as Ionesco’s and
Beckett’s plays. Indeed, more than any other Bergman film of the time, The Magician seems to carry much with it
that links it to the theater of the absurd. And even Buñuel’s later work seems
to share elements. If nothing else, The
Magician is not one of Bergman’s brooding studies of God and doubt. In
fact, Vogel as a kind of God, wins out in the end, while the doubters are
sentenced to the hell of their small-town lives and ambitions.
Los Angeles,
May 21, 2016
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (May 2016).
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