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The basis is Sjöström's He Who Gets Slapped, with an expressionist short to kick things off: Bleached vistas, cacophonous jeering, booming cannons, a clown carrying his bare wife in a flesh-bound Calvary. (It's a memory shared in a circus caravan, something to pass the time on a cold morning.) Shabby saltimbanques in town, no costumes left so the owner (Åke Grönberg) and his young mistress (Harriet Andersson) have to borrow some from the big top's pompous double, the theater. The imperious director (Gunnar Björnstrand) halts a rehearsal to announce the difference between them: "We make art. You make artifice." The ringleader yearns for a staid household, the wife he abandoned (Annika Tretow) has become a prosperous businesswoman with no use for a husband. Meanwhile, the jealous equestrienne sees a flirtation with a vain, cruel thespian (Hasse Ekman) spiral out of control. A world of "misery, lice, disease," wrapped up for the night's spectacle: "Beauty and thrills, to say nothing of laughter!" Ingmar Bergman's existential sideshow, a ruthless wiping of sundry kinds of greasepaint. The hourglass coquette next to a lantern on the darkened stage is a central image, the scurvy bear in the grimy cage is a leaden symbol thankfully put out of its misery. Emaciated, grimacing Anders Ek and rotund, sweaty Grönberg like Laurel and Hardy with a suicidal revolver, the duo burst out of the claustrophobic wagon and stumble across the camp in a marvelous wacky-sinister moment, forcing their vehemence into song. "Got it off your chest now?" An excruciating fight for the delectation of the audience, a battered companion is better than none for the road ahead. "A broadside ballad on film," its closing note is the jester's dream of peaceful disintegration, and the following year there's Fellini with La Strada. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. With Gudrun Brost, Erik Strandmark, and Curt Löwgren. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |