Two Movies About Magicians

The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet, 2010)

This is Sylvain Chomet’s animated version of the lost Jacques Tati film, based on a script by Tati himself; Chomet is known for the awesome animated film The Triplets of Belleville, while Tati is the creator of classic French slapstick comedies Mon Oncle and Playtime. The latter two are part of a series starring Tati as Monsieur Hulot, a bumbling but good-natured man who stumbles into odd and often satiric situations. Instead of making another Hulot film, Chomet casts Tati (here "Tatischeff") as a bumbling but good-natured magician who travels around looking for work. Along the way he adopts and abandons a young girl (representing Tati's real-life abandonment of his daughter). The image here is of Director-as-Magician, one whose work is not appreciated by the modern crowd, and whose transient life cannot sustain typical relationships. Chomet has made a sentimental film, pouring on the nostalgia for an old Europe and an old art-form: magic, slapstick, animation, fatherhood, fill-in-the-blank. Tati's cinema was equally nostalgic, but more biting and less tidy. The Illusionist reinforces the greatness of Tati by its inability to match his satiric vision; instead it is more openly sincere and obviously gorgeous.

The Magician (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)

Another example of Director-as-Magician, the Swedish great Ingmar Bergman's autobiographical mood-piece The Magician has many characters, all of whom gain our sympathy to some measure. It is simple enough to read the film from the magician’s point of view, who is here a mute man played by Max von Sydow, but Bergman gives strong, sympathetic insights into the antagonistic characters as well. The plot follows the interactions between the magician's troupe and the government officials who kidnap them and force them to perform their routine, under the pretense of scrutinizing its acceptability for the public. These officials are obviously and sometimes comically villainous. At one moment they seem cruel, yet at another they appear to be players in a much more difficult play. The backstage drama involving the servants is (in contrast) sexually awake and sometimes light-hearted, giving the film an upstairs-downstairs dichotomy to accompany its spoken themes of scientific realism vs. faith in fantasy. As rich as any Bergman film, and one of many precursors to Fanny and Alexander.