However romantic the fantasy of running away to join the circus, the reality is something a bit grimmer. See, the thing about running away is that you\u2019ve got to keep going. All that escapist excitement starts to sag when money\u2019s tight and you and your mistress have fallen out of lust. Especially when your broke troupe\u2019s fancy costumes all got ruined by the rain and the bear is starving. Such is the dismal scenario that begins Ingmar Bergman\u2019s Sawdust and Tinsel<\/em>, which despite its title, is most definitely not a Christmas movie. The film was originally released in the U.S. as The Naked Night<\/em>, which tells you a thing or two about how foreign films were marketed back then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sawdust and Tinsel<\/em> was Bergman\u2019s 13th<\/sup> film. Though not a critical or box office success, it\u2019s one the filmmaker felt was a breakthrough. In a videotaped introduction on Criterion\u2019s Bergman box set, he says \u201cI felt for the first time I\u2019d made a good film.\u201d He also recites a vicious review he still had committed to memory some 50 years later, in which the critic declared: \u201cI refuse to perform an ocular inspection of Mr. Bergman\u2019s latest vomit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a tough picture, brutal in ways that presage the sexual humiliations and emotional violence that would come to define his later work, with the main couple locked in a masochistic dance of mutual self-loathing. The ringmaster Albert (\u00c5ke Gr\u00f6nberg) is a sweaty, corpulent wreck having paint-peeling, Strindbergian arguments with the voluptuous bareback rider Anne (Harriet Andersson) with whom he fled from his wife and children. Bergman was having an affair with Andersson at the time and his camera is positively in thrall to her fleshy sensuality and Bettie Page bangs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum\u2019s controversial 2007 New York Times<\/em> takedown of Bergman (published while his corpse was still warm and titled \u201cScenes From an Overrated Career<\/a>\u201d) suggested that one of the only reasons the director\u2019s grim, challenging films ever became popular was because the actresses in them were so sexy. Rosenbaum\u2019s article may have been ugly-spirited and poorly timed, but he\u2019s not wrong about how hot Bergman\u2019s movies are. The fact that they can be so difficult to watch only adds to the erotic frisson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a secondhand story about the humiliation of a clown named Frost, whose wife was seen bathing nude by a randy army regiment. This is one of those nasty tales told late at night by folks on the road to pass the time, but visualized by Bergman as a silent-era expressionistic nightmare where the dialogue drops out and only the sounds of laughter and phallic cannon blasts remain. It\u2019s an indelibly upsetting sequence, zeroing in on the frailty and helplessness of this wretched, laughingstock clown. The bullying is shot through with the crippling fear of female sexuality, especially when it\u2019s aging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sawdust and Tinsel<\/em> was Bergman\u2019s first film with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, the beginning of one of the most durable and important artistic partnerships in cinema history. The two would work together for the next three decades, with the cameraman\u2019s rich, Rembrandt lighting helping to define Bergman\u2019s signature style. Nykvist only shot the interiors of Sawdust and Tinsel<\/em>, but you can already see the start of their trademark closeups and a use of mirrors that leaves the characters with nowhere to hide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2003, the Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise invited ten filmmakers to present a Bergman movie that had a profound effect on them. In what in retrospect should come as no surprise at all, director Catherine Breillat<\/a> selected Sawdust and Tinsel<\/em>. She wrote an essay<\/a> for Cahiers du Cinema<\/em> about Harriet Andersson\u2019s bangs and how this was the movie that made her decide to become a filmmaker, claiming \u201cThis film invented me when I was twelve years old. It awakened me to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not bad for \u201cMr. Bergman\u2019s latest vomit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Sawdust and Tinsel” is streaming on The Criterion Channel<\/a> and Max<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/sawdust2-1024x768.jpeg\")
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Especially when a slimy, attractive stage actor named Frans (Hasse Ekman) sets his sleazy sights on Anne while Albert is in town visiting the wife and family he left behind. Bergman orchestrates these two devastating interludes \u2013 at one point dissolving between the women\u2019s faces in a way that predicts the signature shot from Persona<\/em> \u2013 as if conducting a symphony of misery. But everything harrowing that happens in Sawdust and Tinsel<\/em> was already foretold in the film\u2019s seemingly unrelated prologue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n