September 8, 2006

Venice. The Magic Flute.

The Magic Flute Kenneth Branagh "takes Mozart's The Magic Flute off the stage (where it remained in Ingmar Bergman's 1975 film) and on to the killing fields of the first world war," writes Lee Marshall for the Guardian. "But at the same time, he makes war itself a play, turning the kookily esoteric opera into a metaphor of the struggle between dark and light in a Europe undergoing a loss of innocence.... Stephen Fry's liberally translated English-language libretto sometimes comes on all Gilbert and Sullivan ('I can end the pain I'm feeling/ Just by swinging from the ceiling')... But the sheer visual verve of Branagh's peppy direction turns this into that rarest of beasts: opera you can eat popcorn to."

But "adopting a hard-edged approach that worked for Hamlet but squeezes most of the lightness and fun out of Mozart's featherlight masterwork, Branagh has wrought a Flute for high-end aficionados only," counters Variety's Derek Elley.

"She was cast straight out of university without a professional performance to her name. But last night Amy Carson, 23, was the belle of the ball at the Venice Film Festival," enthuses Louise Jury in the Independent.

Marshall considers the film's prospects in Screen Daily. In short, it'll make a great DVD.



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Posted by dwhudson at September 8, 2006 6:21 AM

Comments

When film critics, most of whom can't tell their Parsifal from their Butterfly, write about opera, opera buffs should be beware. e.g. Lee Marshall, who calls The Magic Flute a ‘kookily esoteric opera’, in The Guardian writes: ‘Stephen Fry's liberally translated English-language libretto... dares to turn long passages of recitative into spoken dialogue.' What Marshall does not seem to know is that The Magic Flute is a singspiel with long passages of dialogue and few pure recitatives. Derek Elley in Variety writes that Monostatos being ‘a man of the common people rather than some priestly authority’.Monostatos is the evil moor who guards Sarastro’s palace in the opera. I think he means Sarastro.

Posted by: ronald bergan at September 10, 2006 12:23 AM