In the Presence of a Clown

A middle-aged man in a Swedish insane asylum awakens to find Death at his bedside. She's a clown in white face wearing a duncecap who bares her breasts and invites him to sodomize her. Let's just say Ingmar Bergman has come a ways from the chess game in The Seventh Seal in In the Presence of a Clown, which he wrote and directed in 1997 for Swedish television. The obsessions remain the same, however, in this melancholy trifle that is a grab bag of Bergmania from Sawdust and Tinsel to Autumn Sonata.

The patient is Carl Åkerblom (Börje Ahlstedt), a failed inventor prone to fits of rage, one of which ended with him splitting open the head of his much younger fiancée, Pauline (Marie Richardson). She forgives him, and once she's bailed Carl out of the asylum they join his fellow patient Professor Vogler (Erland Josephson) in making "the first and only speaking film in the world" (the year is 1925), about the last days of Franz Schubert. The technology is primitive -- the "speaking" part is provided by the filmmakers, who say their lines into microphones behind the screen -- but soon the production is touring the boondocks on the Arctic frontier. When the fusebox blows, they are reduced to the bare stage itself, and the result is a fusion of art and real life, with Death, of course, waiting in the wings. Minor Bergman to be sure, this Clown still knows how to make you laugh and cry.

-- Peter Keough