Tag: Foreign Language

THE MAGIC FLUTE (Sweden, 1975)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman
CAST: Josef Köstlinger, Irma Urrila, Håkan Hagegård, Birgit Nordin
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 91% Fresh

PLOT: Valiant prince Tamino and his zestful sidekick Papageno are recruited by the Queen of the Night to save her daughter from the clutches of evil.


Here lies the noble, magical illusion of the theater.  Nothing is; everything represents. – Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman’s whimsical staging of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is a movie made by a theater fan, for theater fans…and to a certain degree, it’s about theater fans.  I use the word “staging” instead of “film of” because, throughout the movie, Bergman never once lets us forget that we’re watching a staged production.  The opera’s overture plays over shots of the audience members, and at intermission we watch actors passing the time by playing chess or smoking where they shouldn’t be.  Once or twice, we see the hands of the stage crew as they move from one “cue card” to the next.  Fishing wire is clearly visible when objects “float.”  But the very artificiality of the production is what makes it so charming.  It celebrates artifice and scorns reality.  It wouldn’t surprise me if this were one of the favorite films of Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam.

Since my only previous knowledge of the story of The Magic Flute comes from a precious few scenes in the film Amadeus (1984), here’s a brief summary for anyone else who knows as much about opera as I do.  The brave, handsome prince Tamino and his enthusiastic sidekick Papageno are recruited by the Queen of the Night to rescue her beautiful daughter, Pamina, from the clutches of the evil Sarastro.  Before the opera is over, there will be revelations, separations, reunions, laughter, tears, semi-divine intervention, and even an operatic strip-tease.  There are monsters, woodland creatures, villains, three angelic young boys in a hot air balloon, and, of course, a magic flute.  And it’s all portrayed as it might be seen if we were watching it on a real stage in a real theater, with some obvious cinematic licenses taken with time and space.

I’m gonna be brutally honest: having never seen an opera, I had moderate-to-low expectations of how much I would enjoy it, even if the music is by my second-favorite classical composer of all time.  (Beethoven is the king, and that is that.)  But Bergman’s film sidestepped my expectations by not trying to present anything in a realistic way, or by simply staging a live production and just filming it from multiple cameras.  By keeping everything clearly artificial, clearly staged, and occasionally using clever movie tricks, The Magic Flute held my attention, making me curious about what other tricks Bergman might have up his sleeve.

For example, he’ll start a scene with a wide shot, showing the entire stage with the flats and fake backdrops, then cut to a medium shot, making us think we’re in the space we just were, then panning over to reveal a completely separate set that was invisible before.  But because it’s been established that we’re in the realm of theater, this kind of spatial paradox isn’t jarring, it’s almost expected.  You can get away with certain things in theater, especially opera, especially in a fantasy, that would never fly in a regular movie.  In The Magic Flute, a person’s face can be completely made over with a simple edit.  A picture in a locket can come to life.  A journey through a fantastic hellscape can be suggested by clever editing and careful camera placement.

But what if you simply don’t like opera?  Is The Magic Flute enough to convert you?  I mean…maybe?  If you’re a fan of the films of Terry Gilliam, particularly Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), then this movie is going to be right up your alley.  They share the same visual strategies and production design sensibilities.  Even if you believe you don’t like opera, The Magic Flute could still win you over for at least this one movie, simply because it’s such fun to look at.

Looking back over what I’ve written so far, I don’t believe I’ve accurately conveyed how the deliberate “fakeness” of the film enhances its effectiveness.  Live theater has the ability to get audiences to suspend their disbelief in a way that film cannot always achieve.  I’ve seen community theater productions where, for example, the walls of a café are supposed to “fly” off the stage revealing a night sky, and the effect was accomplished by simple lighting tricks.  A clubhouse foyer can be magically transformed into a golf course with a green carpet and some more selective lighting.  In live theater, the audience is constantly aware that it’s fake, but when they’re in the grip of a good story, their mind fills in the blanks.  That’s the effect Bergman is going for in The Magic Flute, and it works.

So, in the end, what you have here is a love letter to the stage, to opera, to Mozart, to fantasy.  Throughout the film, Bergman will cut to the face of young girl, an audience member, who watches with rapt attention and an almost Mona Lisa-esque smile.  Not only is he reminding us, the viewer, that this is a staged production, but maybe he’s also sending a reminder to filmmakers to never forget that, for a movie or play or opera to work, you have to remember who you’re making it for: the paying audience.  Speaking as an occasional audience member myself, I know that, when I buy a ticket, I want to be taken out of myself.  I want to believe that a man can fly, or that a wooden puppet can come to life, or that a valiant prince can overcome three tasks to win the heart of his beloved.  The Magic Flute is a tribute to the magic-makers and the storytellers, to the genius of Mozart, and to the people out there in the dark who make it all possible.

WEEKEND (France, 1967)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Jean Luc Godard
CAST: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Fresh

PLOT: A married couple go on the road trip from hell to visit the wife’s parents, intending to kill them for her inheritance.


You don’t risk the time it takes to do this…unless the act itself has meaning. – Detective Somerset, Se7en (1995)

In my personal opinion, there are few things more dangerous than a skilled director who genuinely has something to say.  Oliver Stone.  Stanley Kubrick.  Martin Scorsese.  Spike Lee.  Even Kevin Smith (Dogma, 1999), among many others you or I could name.  Give these guys a finished script and a camera and watch the fireworks from a safe distance.

In 1967, iconoclastic filmmaker Jean Luc Godard became disgusted or disillusioned or just plain pissed off about the class division in France and around the world, especially with how the middle class/bourgeoisie had forsaken human connection for the accumulation of material wealth.  So, he dashed off a screenplay, gathered up a crew and some actors (including a lead actress that he specifically did not like, because he needed her to play a CHARACTER he did not like), and made a film that defies classification or genre.  Is it a comedy?  A drama?  Satire?  I’m still not sure.  All of the above?  None of the above?  Weekend stands stubbornly apart from anything I’ve ever seen, thumbing its nose at the world with one hand while flipping the bird with the other.  It is many things, but timid it is not.

The movie begins with a simple enough scene, interrupted by title cards that say things like, “A FILM FOUND IN A DUMP”.  A husband and wife calmly discuss their plans to murder her parents so she can get her inheritance.  They might as well be talking about what movie to see tonight.  When the husband leaves the room, the wife takes a call from her lover.  In the driveway of their house, a fight breaks out among three people about…what?  Doesn’t matter, they’re never seen again, and the husband and wife observe the fight without commenting on it or making any attempt to stop it.

This is followed by an extraordinary scene, in a film full of extraordinary scenes, in which the wife, apparently speaking to her analyst, describes, in graphic detail, a sexual encounter she had with a strange man and his other mistress.  Meanwhile, Godard’s camera does a slooow zoom in to the woman’s face, then a slooow zoom out to reveal she’s in her bra and panties, then another slooow zoom in, and out, and in, and out, and you get the idea, right, wink, wink, nudge, nudge?

Is Godard being too obvious in this scene?  Clearly.  So, what is he trying to say here?  By being so blatantly obvious, is he parodying earlier French New Wave and Italian neo-realist films, some of which invested a lot of screen time in long conversations about nothing?  Sure, let’s go with that.  What’s with that in-and-out camera move that I read someone describe as “masturbatory” that occurs during the explicit discussion?  Is he also poking fun at other filmmakers who lack subtlety?  Yep, that works, too.  In a weird way, I was reminded of Tarantino’s Kill Bill cycle, movies that took every kung fu trope imaginable, turned the volume up to eleven, and then turned it up some more.  That’s what Godard is doing here.  Why?  As Robin Williams once said, “Because we’re French.”

That’s just the first two scenes.  Later, there is a justly famous tracking shot (really two or three that are spliced together) that lasts for nine minutes and covers 300 meters of ground.  It tracks past an endless traffic jam as our “heroes” try to get around them on their way to kill her parents.  The camera passes cars, convertibles, trailer trucks, a flatbed with two caged lions and a monkey on a leash, horns honking, people yelling at each other.  THIS part reminded me of some of the best “Family Guy” gags where something is spun out for a ridiculously long time, where the duration of the event becomes the gag, instead of the gag itself.  In the film, it actually did become kind of funny…until finally, nine minutes later, we see the cause of the traffic jam, and my jaw dropped.

Car accidents are a recurring motif throughout the film.  Perhaps they represent Godard’s assertion that his country was, at the time, more or less a trainwreck.  With other filmmakers, showing just one or two car wrecks would get the point across.  Not Godard.  They’re everywhere.  And you don’t get just twisted and burning metal; there’s also broken and bloody bodies adorning the wrecks and the roadside.  And through all of this (and more), our main characters walk or drive, apathetic to the chaos, asking everyone – even the dead bodies – how to get back to the main road, blind to the madness around them.

Godard adds intertitles at random intervals, some of which are laden with French cultural references that escaped me.  Some of them didn’t even get translations on my Blu Ray.  One of them says “THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL”, which is the title of a famous film by Luis Buñuel…sly wink to the cinemaniacs in the audience.  Go Godard, celebrating geek culture before it was cool.  Some of them are repeated while the film backtracks as if the projectionist is having a spasm.  At one point, the film jumps and skips forward as if there was a bad splice in the reel. At another, a scene occurs in a field full of abandoned cars. Then, JUMP CUT, and the cars are now a flock of sheep. Take THAT, audience expectations!

At every stage, Godard is constantly reminding the viewer that they’re watching a movie.  One of the characters even says, “What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people.”  Later there are scenes that approximate some kind of revolution.  Battles are fought.  The gunplay looks curiously amateurish.  There’s a scene with a pig.  I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say that it was definitely harmed in the making of this movie.  Same with the chicken.

The chaotic nature of the movie was mesmerizing, like…a car accident that you can’t turn away from.  To fully analyze every historical, literary, and cinematic reference would be like trying to catalog every single pop culture reference in Ready Player One [2018], and that’s something for which I have neither the time, the inclination, the education, nor the space to do.  Weekend is not for everyone, he said, blatantly stating the obvious.  But I ultimately enjoyed it because it’s not that often I get to listen to the voice of a really angry filmmaker.  I may only understand the basics of what Godard is angry about, but that doesn’t diminish the power of his statement.