Quick Movie Review: The Magician

5/10

Oh dear oh dear. This 'Classic' black and white Bergman gets a lousy five from me.

It's not that it was bad.. it was totally ok. Beautifully shot and very finely acted, this is the story of a troupe of "magnetic healers" who are in trouble with the authorities after strange events in their last perforance... the film is wonderfully ambiguous about whether they are actually capable of any of the things that are their act, certainly the grandmother is much more than she seems. This seems to be the interesting angle tyo concentrate on, but the film mainly focusses on the (in my opinion at least) less interesting story of the local police chief and his buddies mocking the troupe and their attempts to show them as charlatans.

The best thing in it, as was the case with The Seventh Seal, is Gunnar Bjornstrand (the squire in TSS, by the way) as the medical chief fascinated by the motley band's claims, but really I finished the film with no real idea what its point was, or why I should care.

There are at least three fascinating tales here, but all are merely hinted at, with a far larger amount of time spent on lame innuendo and the frankly hideous Tubal chatracter who is more or less Jack Black in black and white. I wanted more of the magical ambiguity, I wanted a showdown between the two men at the centre of events to be absoltuely apocalyptic, I wanted the married couple to fall back in love, I wanted anybody to get their comeuppance.... didn't happen.

There are a couple of chuckles, a marvellously creepy scene of psychological torture upstairs in the attic/autopsy room and a great atmosphere, but these things alone do not make a good movie. Bergman's ability as a filmmaker is not in doubt, but I doubt this will be high on anyone's list of classic movies.

The ending is appallingly slight and rushed (rain stops so immediately no trace of it can be seen anywhere), with no moral message or anything else interesting to show for the end of the tale. What was Bergman's point? No idea. It seems to me like the ending was perhaps changed and reshot at the last minute. The news everyone receives at the end is ludicrous to the point where I threw up my hands in despair.

Not that good, I'm afraid.

A