The Magic Flute (2006)
Some thoughts on Kenneth Branagh’s The Magic Flute.
The sun shone as it had to… The opening scenes of World War I troops going over the top seem to have so little to do with the overture that it is initially hard to make much sense of it all. The advance, for that matter, is equally odd, a strange little scurry of 
Stratego men walking through barbed wire and falling bloodlessly over. Even the trenches are somehow alien, like crop circles, like inexplicable wounds in the otherwise green and fertile soil. And there’s the point. World War I had as little to do with the world as it has to do with the music. War movies typically depict Nature in supreme sympathy with human suffering: D-Day will be bleak and cold, the rain is heavy, the mud is thick. But it wouldn’t have been like that. On days where hundreds killed and died, there would be sunshine, rainbows. Butterflies.
A Many-Splendored Thing. In this version, as in every other Magic Flute I have ever seen, Papageno wins. Tamino and Pamina’s grand passion is just a bit too inaccessible to us ordinary mortals, and the characters depend for all their charm on the actors who are playing them. In Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, the play’s lovers share exactly one scene for precisely four lines: The Magic Flute’s lead lovers’ most memorable scene together lasts about as long, and with only one of the two speaking. I have never yet been tempted to storm a sorcerer’s castle to rescue a lady, and never will: but I have frequently fallen in love with people reconstructed entirely from a way of walking or a half-glimpsed glance.
The Magic Flute is a fantasy, and it has long been a stock fixture of that genre to include a mildly comedic character who seems somehow weaker or less capable than the others but, in the end, does something Tremendously Important which Saves The Day. In general I dislike these characters immensely, but Papageno always wins me over, and I am never quite sure why. Maybe it is because, in a world now top and bottom heavy with Good and Evil, Papageno occupies exactly that tiny point in the vast and almost empty chasm between the two which I can identify with. He would not lie about saving your life, but nor would he correct you if you thought he had. That is precisely the shade of grey for me.
Difficile est proprie communia dicere. It is with some shame that I admit that part of the reason I don’t tend to like English language operas is that the words tend to get in the way of the music, and I find an aria infinitely less beautiful when I understand the cornball platitudes it comprises. Ditto English translations, which are doubly distracting when you are familiar with the original. The fact that this libretto is by Stephen Fry openly invites inspection and comment, when the most one should be hoping for from a translation is that is slips under the radar more or less unnoticed. If an unknown had penned it, well, I should probably not have been quite so aware of the triteness of the thing. That said, if Fry is unable to counterbalance the source material’s apparent lack of interest in imbuing any of the other characters with identifiable personality traits, he is at least able to give some life to Papageno, prompting the first and possibly the last time that I have ever laughed at a non-spoken line in an opera. (Unless you count Gilbert and Sullivan, in which case you can disregard this entire last paragraph.)
All’s well that ends well. So, in the end, if I have talked more about the opera than the film, it is because the best thing that can be said about the movie is that it is recognisably The Magic Flute. The conceit about WWI doesn’t quite come off, perhaps because the “senseless conflict” analogy doesn’t really hold: the Queen of the Night, in the run of things, is a villain, and villains exist to be defeated. You could go on in that vein indefinitely, I suppose, but events like The Magic Flute come along so rarely that you have to support them wherever their shoots spring up. A few months ago I went to see a local production of Annie, and the overall effect was not dissimilar. The parts that I liked, I liked; the parts I didn’t like, I didn’t like; and I went home happier with a headful of song and thought, well, come now, life isn’t that bad really, is it? In the end, I mean?