The Magic Flute, directed by Kenneth Branagh
Sergio Eisenstein believed that "cinema is a synthesis of all the arts". If that is so then film critics should at least be versed, to a certain degree, in the other arts. But, as many reviews of Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute have revealed, most film critics, when it comes to opera, can't tell their Parsifal from their Butterfly.
Like Papageno's magic glockenspiel, alarm bells began to ring for me with the first reviews of The Magic Flute from the Venice Film Festival in September. Typical was Lee Marshall writing in the Guardian of Branagh's version of Mozart's "kookily esoteric opera". He pointed out that "Stephen Fry's liberally translated English-language libretto... dares to turn long passages of recitative into spoken dialogue". What Marshall did not seem to know is that The Magic Flute is a singspiel with long passages of dialogue between the arias and no recitatives. Marshall also claimed that "opera is stagey and static; film tries to look like real life". Nobody would ever call productions by Harry Kupfer, Peter Stein, Peter Sellars, Jonathan Miller or Giorgio Strehler, to name but a few, "stagey and static". And film "tries to look like real life"? A list of films that try to do the opposite would be too exhaustive.
Derek Elley in Variety wrote that Monostatos was "a man of the common people rather than some priestly authority". Actually, Monostatos is the evil moor who guards Sarastro's palace. Astonishingly, last week, Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times praises Branagh for playing "the race card by casting dark-skinned Thomas Randle as Monostatos". But Monostatos is always sung by a black or blacked-up singer, as the libretto dictates, in every performance of the opera.
Wendy Ide in the Times admitted the singers "seemed perfectly decent to my inexpert ears". Someone with "inexpert ears" is not the best person to write intelligently about opera. For example, I would disqualify myself from writing about any film, such as Last Days, Joe Strummer or Control, where a knowledge of pop music (most of which I detest) was essential to the appreciation of the movie.
Charlotte O'Sullivan in the Evening Standard, who felt "the horrors of Flanders provide a strange but satisfying glue", worryingly confessed that "for the first time ever, the plot made sense to me". Which makes me wonder how many productions she has actually seen and which ones. Would any critic dare say a similar thing on watching Ethan Hawkes' Hamlet, set in modern-day New York?
Empire's Kat Brown thinks Branagh "has done a good job of toning down the opera's more ridiculous elements". Such as? Fran Hortop on the Channel 4 website says, "You would be forgiven for thinking that Mozart was having a laugh when he came up with The Magic Flute... The story is silly and sleight [sic]." Total Film, which mentions Mozart's "feather-light" opera - one of the great monuments of Western art - concludes that "love it or loathe it, the silliness in the story is all Mozart's". "All Mozart's"? No mention of Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the libretto, nor any reference to the original as compared to Stephen Fry's. One critic even admitted to not knowing how it compares with the original. Hortop merely announces that Stephen Fry adapts "the libretto into - gosh - English", something the ENO and other opera companies have done for decades. Nicholas Barber in the Independent recommended that readers rent the DVD of Amadeus instead. Surely, a more relevant recommendation would have been a DVD of a classic stage production of The Magic Flute, or would that be asking too much? The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw was wooly in his praise of the film, calling it "a genial and good-natured production with much spectacle and entertainment to offer", without going any deeper.
The problem is that few critics were willing or able to pick up the gauntlet that Branagh has laid down by setting the 1791 opera in the trenches during the First World War. How does the adaptation illuminate or obfuscate Mozart's opera? Do the trials of fire and water work in the context? Does the lack of the Masonic element diminish or benefit the interpretation? Why did Branagh eliminate The Speaker, giving his role to Sarastro? How does it compare with Ingmar Bergman's film version in which he respected the theatrical conventions while demystifying the operatic experience and making it cinematic? Whatever the quality or otherwise of Branagh's film, I feel he deserved film critics who knew more about opera.
