Set mostly at the seedy end of the music hall world, the film has a pristine quality that's as unreal as Chaplin's own performance: his room always seems like a stage set, and the drama that unfolds there between Bloom and he is more a vision of mutual redemption than a depiction of it. The flashbacks to his heyday are similarly shot in a cavernous, icy vacuum, soaked in loneliness - confirmed by the reverse shot to rows of empty seats; when he shows the audience during the ultimate triumphant benefit, their (insincere and forced) clapping is as soulless and distant as the earlier silence (even so, he grasps the illusion as his last best hope). A couple of brief disembodied scenes of Chaplin, and later the two of them, moving along the river bank, staring ahead, embody the pervasive sense of dislocation. In this context, Chaplin's endless inspirational monologues and homilies can plausibly be taken as a knowing self-delusion, an almost pathological insistence on an underlying meaning of transforming, redemptive power, even as his own life so completely fails to yield it - the character's name (Calvero) bleeds religious pain every time it's uttered. Keaton's brief appearance is more emblematic of true loss and pain, but the film has little choice but to reject such realism, and keeps his involvement to a minimum.
