Taking place at the turn of the 20th century, Sawdust and Tinsel is set in a nearly destitute traveling circus, which immediately gives the film an air of the slightly surreal with its clowns, trained animals, and other vaguely bizarre sights. The main character is Albert Johansson (Åke Grönberg), the corpulent circus owner who is constantly sweating through his middle years. When the film opens, his circus is returning to the small town where he left his wife (Annika Tretow) and young children many years ago. Albert's mistress, a beautiful young woman named Anne (Harriet Andersson), doesn't like that Albert is planning to see his estranged wife, so she allows her jealousy to lead her into the arms of Frans (Hasse Ekman), an effete scoundrel of an actor in the local theater troupe.

As the story suggests, Sawdust and Tinsel is spun out of the twin, interlocking threads of sexual jealousy and humiliation, something Bergman was particularly attuned to. When he wrote and directed the film he was already on his third marriage and was engaged in an affair with Harriet Andersson, an unknown whom he had made a star by casting her in his previous film, the scandalous Summer With Monika (1953). The film plays in a series of bitter setpieces in which the characters are tempted by others and fail miserably to maintain their dignity.

For Albert, seeing his wife and children for the first time in years tempts him with the opportunity to leave the circus life, with its nomadic wandering and lack of stability. While such a life was once dazzling enough for him to leave his family, it has clearly failed to make good on its promise of independence and adventure. Anne, on the other hand, seems to be acting primarily out of fear; she senses that Albert will be tempted to leave her for a steady homelife, thus she attempts to leave him first. Bergman saw pieces of himself in both characters, but particularly Albert with his simultaneous desire for show business and bourgeois normality (interestingly, this is one of the few films that Bergman, also an accomplished theater director, set in the world of show business).

As many of Bergman's films are autobiographical in nature, at least emotionally and philosophically, it is hard not to read a dark mentality into Sawdust and Tinsel, which offers at best the promise of reconciliation, but no hope of genuine happiness. The characters are all twisted and sad, living out their miserable lives and failing to transcend their limitations. The film reaches a climactic point of both sadness and absurdity when Albert and Frans duke it out in the circus's center ring. Albert's literal fight for respect ends with him beaten and eating dust, a fitting image for the film's despondent view of the nature of human relationships. The film's other major setpiece, the aforementioned flashback at the beginning of the film, involves the circus clown (Anders Ek) having to reclaim his wife (Gudrun Brost) from a naked swim with a group of leering and cackling soldiers. Bergman filmed the sequence in such harsh, overexposed light that it takes on the tone of a nightmare, with the bleached image threatening the same lack of vision and coherence traditionally associated with darkness.

For Bergman, this sequence is the root of the film's trauma, and each character acts out a unique dance of jealousy and humiliation, finally learning to accept what they have and move on with life. In this sense, Sawdust and Tinsel holds out a modicum of hope, but only enough to suggest that human relationships, despite their difficulties, are what keep us together.

Copyright ©2007 James Kendrick

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