You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

On their single night together, Eurydice mumbles in her sleep: “It’s so difficult.” Orpheus, according to Jean Anouilh’s play, hears the words but doesn’t understand what she means. The next morning, Eurydice flees, departing on a bus for Toulon and dies in an accident on the highway. “It’s so difficult” refers to the impossibility of men and women ever fully understanding one another. This is the great and dismaying theme dramatized by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Female vanity and fickleness, male pride and jealousy and possessiveness -- these ineradicable characteristics in human nature destroy any opportunity for lasting love and happiness. Great love is immortal, the myth tells us: it persists beyond death and unto the gates of Hell itself. But it is equally true -- and the myth informs us of this as well -- that catastrophic misunderstandings between the sexes also persist and are unavoidable and afflict us even unto death and beyond the gates of Hell as well. In Alain Resnais’ 2012 “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”, a series of phone calls inform 14 famous French actors and actresses, all of them playing themselves, that a great playwright has died. The thespians are summoned to the playwright’s mountain-top manor, a sort of Mount Olympus among the high summits of the Pyrenees or Alps. The actors are gathered in a great round room with a cloister-walk at its perimeter and a sky-band overhead. The place is a cosmos with chaotic winds blowing outside, an environment obviously stylized, like a vast theater set. The actors and actresses sit in big chairs upholstered in funereal black and an enigmatic, half-smiling psychopompus, a white-haired valet who looks like Hugh Hefner, darkens the room and shows a film on a big screen at one end of the hall. The deceased playwright appears on-screen and salutes the company and says that the three women among the mourners have all performed, at one time or another, in his drama about Eurydice and Orpheus. Similarly, the male actors have all appeared in one role or another in the play over the years. The playwright invites his friends to watch an avant-garde version of the play, rehearsals of the so-called Compagnie de la Columbe, on the screen. So the drama about Orpheus and Eurydice begins and, as the play advances, the actors in the audience begin to remember lines and commence reciting them at first, then, acting out scenes, and, finally, are absorbed into a series of stylized sets where they perform roles in the drama. This device allows Resnais to stage scenes from Anouilh’s play (or plays) with the greatest actors of his epoch, all of these men and women very old now, but playing, in their memories it seems, the parts of the young lovers. The effect is initially startling -- ancient, dignified actors playing parts written for men and women sixty years younger. Furthermore, the playwright has invited three separate male-female couples to act the title roles of Eurydice and Orpheus -- this results in some scenes being shown three times, moments of high drama repeated in differing interpretations by the actors in the Olympian palace (and, to further complicate matters, their performances doubled again by the young people in the Compagnie de la Columbe whose rehearsal of the play we are also watching in interpolated scenes on the big screen in the mansion, the movie within the movie.) The performances are powerful and the staging vivid and lucid. The repetition of important lines and scenes by different constellations of actors is coherent and swiftly, and effectively, articulated so that the redundancy in the film never becomes irritating. And, indeed, as the film progresses, the picture focuses more and more on specific sets of actors and actresses, allowing them to hold the screen in extended scenes that last five or six minutes at time. Despite the film’s complexity, it is all disconcertingly clear and lucid, almost abstract, a series of theorems and proofs relating to the differing arts of theater and film. All of the sets are obviously theatrical and, with the exception of a tiny epilogue-like sequence in a cemetery in the film’s penultimate scene, the acting and mise-en-scene are all resolutely non-naturalistic. The fundamental problem that afflicts this film is that the play by Jean Anouilh is highly poetic, static, and filled with rather vapid, ambitious and philosophical speeches. I have no doubt that the writing, which seems to me to be in the tradition of Racine, is extraordinary enough, but it seems awfully pretentious to non-French-speaking viewers. Resnais’ staging is beyond reproach, but the point of the exercise seems a bit self-indulgent -- the movie gives the old director (he died in March 2014) an opportunity to work with great and magisterial actors and actresses and lets him use them in ways that their age would not otherwise allow -- old people playing passionate young lovers. But the conceit is poetic, I think, and moving in some ways -- a tribute to play-acting and the theater that defies the fundamental human problem of time and aging. I just wish the play that affords the framework for the film was better or, at least, more congenial to Shakespeare-influenced English-speaking audiences. There is one great moment: an intertitle says “As they crossed the bridge, the ghosts came forth to meet them…” I knew that this line was hauntingly familiar -- in fact, it cites an intertitle from Murnau’s “Nosferatu.”

Whispering Pages

Alexander Sokurov’s “Whispering Pages,” made in 1993 and financed with funds accumulated as if in a nightmare (Krupp Steel and Ruhr Coal are two companies credited), looks like no other film. This is characteristic of Sokurov’s film practice -- each of his pictures is sui generis; this is either an extraordinary feat of creativity or a curse, depending upon your perspective. “Whispering Pages” is subtitled as “derived from motifs in Russian literature of the XIXth century” and the movie looks like a daguerreotype or a mezzotint slowly dissolving in some kind of acrid, chemical fog -- indeed, one sequence of the film, literally indecipherable to my eyes, seems to show the interior of a blast furnace, an alchemical inferno with weird piston-shaped forms that appear to be generating hazes of sulfuric acid that are corroding either the surface of the viewer’s eyes or the film stock or both. (This is not merely a fantasy -- the film was, in fact, completely lost and thought to be irretrievable until a single 35 mm negative turned up somewhere in Germany; the strange, misty sepia tones of “Whispering Pages” may be attributable in part to the film’s troubled provenance.) Just about every image in the movie is astonishing and disturbing in equal measure: the opening shot depicts a colossal wall with curious appendages -- millwork or fire-escapes or ladders, who can tell? At the base of this huge, industrial wall, there is a canal full of dank water. Some birds with startling white plumage beat about in this vast cistern. A haggard young man is wandering around in subterranean galleries that seem to be bored into the base of the wall. Some thugs confront him and lift him in the air, remarking at how light he is -- “light as a feather,” someone exclaims. An old woman has been murdered and the young man seems to have something to do with the homicide. Perhaps, he fantasizes that he has killed the old woman. Everything is dull brown and grey, lightless, off-center -- there is some kind of deep well into which people plunge one after another, apparently drunkenly committing suicide. Cityscapes of desolate brick warehouses and piers shimmer in what seem to be drops of water, globular on other images of vacant brickyards and empty corridors. Things seem to be either enormous or curiously doll-like and miniature. People enter the frame from unexpected angles and there are various hellish stairwells rimmed with flimsy ascending and descending steps and filigree balustrade. A character will be filmed from a half-dozen yards behind his filthy shoulders -- then, a reverse shot will reveal the figure sitting in an alcove no more that 18 inches deep; where was the camera located? Various gloomy chambers, like niches in an underground cave, afford claustrophobic spaces where the young man confronts other characters: a bureaucrat like a figure from Gogol, a saintly young prostitute derived from Sonya in “Crime and Punishment”, poverty-stricken Jews and gypsies, a lumbering ghoulish ruffian who once again lifts the young man in his arms and, then, yanks viciously on his hair. A kind of seizure transfixes the bureaucrat and he freezes into a eerie tableaux like an image from an ancient, half-decayed newspaper and, then, the screen shows us more mist and fog, the image gradually clearing to reveal a painting by Hubert Robert that is, itself, surrealistically odd: it is another underground cavern made of towering Roman arches surrounding a lagoon where little gondolas are plying the dark waters. The prostitute tells the gaunt young man to go to the town square and pray. The young man mocks her as a whore. On the soundtrack, we hear distant snippets of Mahler, satanic laughter, fragments of quarrels and endlessly dripping and flowing water. In the city square, there is a vast forty-foot tall monument to a panther. Crowds stagger like zombies around the panther. At the end of the movie, the young man sits between the haunches of the house-high stone panther and idly tries to suck on the monument’s grape-shaped teats. More fog drifts across the image and the picture of the panther looks like an engraving by Dore. And, with this enigma, the film comes to an end.

Keeper of the Flame

An eerie war fever grips George Cukor’s 1942 propaganda thriller, “Keeper of the Flame.” A famous man has died in a thunderstorm when his car plunged from a washed-out bridge into a stony gorge. The great man was a hero of the Argonne Forest in World War One and he lives on a vast mountain-top estate in an expressionistic wilderness -- the milieu reminds me a little of the summit mansion, apparently on top of Mount Rushmore in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” Cyclopean walls surround dead hero’s manor and there are iron bars barricading the mountain streams that rush down from the canyons below the Berchtesgarten-like aerie. The nation mourns the great man and there is a montage of newspaper headlines and flags and, then, a disquieting shot of a huge crowd of mourners standing as motionless as statues in a downpour on the wet streets of a small city. Among the mourners and their soaking umbrellas, the camera picks out Spencer Tracy, a noble and fearless journalist, who has just returned from covering the war in Europe. We see the dead man’s widow emerge from a sinister-looking church, a rail-thin spike of a woman clad all in black. A malevolent giant (Forest Tucker who was later on TV’s “F Troop”) threatens the journalist and the assembled newspapermen scheme to sneak into the estate that is now closed to them. Tracy’s character makes an alliance with a sexy, and enterprising lady newspaper writer, and they share a hotel room as they connive to get the big story. (The sexy little romance between Tracy’s character and the appealing and sexy lady reporter is abandoned once the film goes into high dudgeon.) Tracy finds a way onto the hero’s estate, enters the courtyard of the dead man’s castle -- the doors are flanked by enormous sphinxes -- and, finally, meets the great man’s enigmatic wife played by a skeletal-looking Valkyrie of a woman, Katherine Hepburn. The dead hero’s name is Forrest, but he might as well be called Charles Lindbergh or Charles Foster Kane. The imagery in the first third of the film is Gothic, startling, and monumental -- everything is bigger than life: the silent crowds of mourners are immense and the wall surrounding the estate looks like the Great Wall of China (it is built with huge ashlars) and the gorge where the dead hero died is a dark ravine spiny with jagged rock and crooked trees that looks like something out of Dante. The décor in the dead man’s palatial manor is suffocating -- Chinese idols and massive bouquets of flowers and vases the size of teenage boys poised and glistening atop ebony pedestals. It’s like “Wuthering Heights” or “Jane Eyre” crossed with “Citizen Kane”, a wild fun-house with leering male secretaries, an insane old woman, and a limping, possibly murderous gamekeeper whose small son is feverish with guilt; the little boy blames himself for the hero’s death. Around the middle of the movie, however, the pace slows and long tendentious speeches paralyze the film. The dead hero’s name is Forrest and this should remind us of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Apparently, the great man was a crypto-fascist conspiring, like Charles Lindbergh, to not only keep America out of the War, but also planning to engineer a coup based on anti-Semitism, anti-Negro sentiment, as well as anti-Catholicism. The picture dissolves into febrile hysteria, messages take over and the whole thing becomes tedious and predictable. Katherine Hepburn, lit like the Bride of Frankenstein, trades long implausibly eloquent speeches with Spencer Tracy and, then, the movie ends in an alarming spasm of violence: lightning, fire, gun shots, rescuers wielding axes, and a man run over and crushed by a speeding automobile. Tracy tells the stunned world that the great man was really a traitor. There is patriotic music, another montage of newspapers and newspaper headlines, and, then, American flags borne in parade as armed multitudes take up arms and march. On the DVD, as an extra there is a fierce and wicked Tex Avery cartoon called “Blitz Wolf” that features a jocular sign that says “No Dogs Allowed” -- the word “Dogs” is crossed out and someone has written “Japs” over its letters. “Blitz Wolf” is savage and wildly surreal -- howitzers spurt bombs like ejaculating penises and, then, go flaccid, enemy shells are deterred by pin-up girl pictures and curl up in front of trenches where the cheesecake is displayed like obedient puppies. The sky is red with fire and huge cannons blast away at the darkness -- in one sequence, bombs erase Tokyo, imagined as a little Japanese tea-garden floating in an azure sea. It’s awful stuff to behold, but more honest, I think, then the genteel war hysteria throbbing beneath Cukor’s lusciously elegant black and white images in “Keeper of the Flame”.

This must be the Place

Probably the only mainstream movie in the last 15 years to use cigarette smoking as an emblem for both regained mental health and a happy ending, Paolo Sorrentino’s “This must be the Place” is bizarre on all levels. This 2011 picture is also an artifact of stupefying visual beauty, intermittently emotionally powerful and an oddity that amazes on account of its graphic ingenuity, weird performances, and mock-heroic themes. Sean Penn plays an aging heavy metal Goth-rock star, retired to a castle in Dublin. Penn’s outlandish appearance is one of the reasons that this film was a commercial failure in the United States -- audiences took one look at the trailer and fled from the film; I know this was my reaction when I saw the movie advertised as a “Coming Attraction.” Penn has startlingly blue eyes that are intensely sad highlighting a drooping face painted stark, clownish white. Penn wears eye-shadow and red lipstick and he has a fright-wig of scraggly black hair in a huge dark nimbus around the expressionless Kabuki-mask of his features. Penn’s character staggers around walking with a pigeon-toed arthritic gait like an elderly woman and he drags behind him a suitcase on wheels. Dressed in funereal black, Cheyenne (the name of the character) looks exactly like Shock Peter (Struwelpeter), the unfortunate hero of a series of macabre and sadistic German children’s tales -- the character is always being frozen or hacked into pieces or devoured by wild animals or stung into a bloated mass of tumors by bees. (In one scene in the film, Cheyenne stands rigid in the corner of a modern kitchen tormented by a huge goose -- a pictorial image that seems derived directly from the Struwelpeter stories; he is like a more demented and outlandish version of Edward Scissorhands.) Cheyenne talks in an inaudible high-pitched whisper, articulating his words with the puzzling clarity of a long-time drug addict; at times, he acts like Ozzie Osborne in the reality TV show -- he is childish, friendly, and constantly bemused. It seems that two of his young fans killed themselves, allegedly inspired in their suicide by Cheyenne’s music and this has caused the rock star to retire to his castle and become a sort of recluse. Either he is extremely depressed, almost to the point of catatonia, or fantastically bored and, in one startling scene set in New York with David Byrne, he confesses that he is paralyzed with guilt over the death of the two fans -- for no good reason, the scene is visually astonishing, set in an abandoned opera house where Byrne seems to be playing some kind of 120 foot long mandolin strung from the balcony to the place’s ruinous stage. It turns out that Cheyenne’s father was an orthodox Jew who was tormented by a Nazi guard in Auschwitz. When the old man dies, Cheyenne decides to hunt down his father’s lifelong nemesis, a project that compels him to embark on an extended road-trip through the American hinterland. Sorrentino is Italian and his United States is full of dwarf sheriffs, tattooed fat ladies, Nietzsche-influenced gun nuts, and enormous, empty landscapes that are almost surrealistically lovely. Parts of the film resemble Werner Herzog’s road film, “Stroszek,” a gallery of misfits and grotesques poised against vast deserts, prairies and mountain ranges. On the sound-track, we hear Sara Palin speaking and Barack Obama and David Byrne’s kindergarten-singable “This must be the Place (Naïve Melody).” The hunt for the Nazi takes Cheyenne to Bad Axe, Michigan and, then, Alamagordo where the hero chastely courts a war-widow, the granddaughter of the ancient Auschwitz guard. (Cheyenne won’t sleep with the beautiful young widow because he is happily married to Jane, his wife in Dublin played by Frances McDormand in her most plain Fargo-style demotic, a character designed for the greatest possible contrast to the depressed, zombie-like Cheyenne -- Jane is also a firefighter.) The climactic scenes in America are very strange and, probably, represent some kind of fantasy -- they don’t make sense in the context of the rest of the film. A number of critics interpret the confrontation with the superannuated Nazi as taking place on salt flats -- but this is clearly wrong: the scene is shot on a kind of barren icy tundra in high mountains and the staging is dreamlike and overtly unrealistic. Cheyenne takes a picture of the old Nazi and, then, strips him naked and makes him walk naked through the snow and the old man’s mummy-like body and dried striated flesh against the fresh-fallen snow is one of the most shocking, obscene, and remarkable things that I have seen in recent films. Is the old man dead? Where does this confrontation occur? All of this is unclear as are, to be honest, a number of other plot elements -- for instance, there is nice-looking sixty-ish woman in Dublin who we see repeatedly and who encourages Cheyenne to smoke, since people “who remain children all their lives” never pick up that habit, a comment that motivates the final “happy ending” involving Cheyenne and the fag. The woman is an important presence in the film but I have no idea who she is or what she represents. Similarly, a young woman who hangs out with Cheyenne in a Dublin coffee-shop near a huge glass building made of elliptical crystal shells seems to be Cheyenne’s daughter. But we learn that he has no children and that she is merely a fan in whom the aging rock star has taken an avuncular interest. A big dog rambles around Cheyenne’s Irish estate, its head encased in a collar like an inverted lampshade. Someone asks Cheyenne why the dog wears the contraption around its throat. “I don’t know,” Cheyenne says. “Jane takes care of the dog.” And this is indicative of any number of strange images in the film that amaze and confound, and that really aren’t ever explained. The film is not a success -- it is too willfully peculiar and too ambiguous. Many of the film’s puzzles seem to be the result of indecision on the part of the director and his screenwriter, vagueness in the conception or, even, confusion. Yet, I guarantee that you will never see anything else like this movie. The combination of elements -- Glam rock, Ozzie Osborne style befuddlement, John Ford landscapes, and Nazis -- simply should not work; the fascinating thing is that it almost does.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

About ten years ago, I noticed that writers in the U.K. were using a word that I didn't know. Certain works of art were said to be "twee". As I understand it, "twee" means something like "precious, inauthentic, overly contrived, annoyingly whimsical and cloyingly cute." An on-line dictionary informs me that the word derives from "sweet" corrupted by baby-talk. I admire Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel," found the 2014 film continuously engaging and, even, emotionally compelling but, I hesitate to say, an unfriendly observor might characterize the entire enterprise as more than a little bit "twee." A title informs viewers that the film originates in writings by Stefan Zweig, a droll claim that, I assume, bears as much relationship to truth as the Coen brothers' claims that "Fargo" is based on real events or that "O Brother Where Art Thou" imitates Homer. In some ways, Anderson's purported reliance on Zweig is even stranger -- it's a joke so abstruse that no one can get it since readers who know anything about Zweig and his writing are not necessariy thick on the ground. (I've read a couple works by Zweig and can see no resemblance at all.) The film takes the form of what was once called "the shaggy dog story" -- an elaborate, tall tale replete with melodrama and comical,if macabre, exaggeration presented in a slightly archaic, formal manner that seems similar to the spidery Victoriana composed by the late Edward Gorey. An enterprising bi-sexual concierge employed by the Grand Budapest Hotel has supplemented his income by sexually entertaining an elderly countess. When the countess dies, she leaves her fortune to the concierge. The countess' relatives are a group of mitteleuropaische goblins who engage Joplin, a hulking thug played by Willem Defoe, to steal the Countess' codicil to her Will and Last Testament -- the document that transfers her wealth, including the Grand Budapest Hotel, to the concierge. An important part of the fortune is a painting by an artist similar to Hans Holbein, a resplendent image of a boy with an apple that the concierge has stolen from the Countess' gothic Schloss and that serves as the MacGuffin in an extended chase that occupies two-thirds of the film. The concierge is accompanied in his adventures by Mustapha, a lobby-boy at the hotel, and he proves to be a courageous and loyal sidekick, a sort of Gunga Din to the elegant, if world-weary, hotelier played by Ralph Fiennes. This tale involves last-minute escapes, bloody murders, a prison-break, motorcycle chases, and a breakneck pursuit down a snowy mountain that involves skiing, ski-jumping, and bobsledding -- all of this action plays out against a vaguely Austria-Hungarian milieu imagined on the brink of World War Two. Anderson stages his narrative as a series of brightly lit diorama-like tableaux -- the film takes place within a series of nested boxes and the characters are confined within toy-like diorama sets that are symmetrically appointed and filmed frontally. The effect is like perusing the exhibits in an old Natural History museum, a series of theatrically designed glass cases displaying mostly static figures, all oriented toward the viewer in the dim corridor of the theater. In all respects, the film is constructed as a series of boxes. First, the movie has not one but two frame stories: in the opening scene, a girl who is apparently a member of the secret society of concierges, the order of the Crossed Keys (I was once one myself) goes to a snowy graveyard in the center of Europe, a place like Prague, to visit the tomb of a writer that she admires. This writer is the author of a novel called "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and, as she reads the book, it comes to life and is dramatized in the film: the writer travels to the moribund Grand Budapest Hotel, a place like Sils Maria or the sinister Overlook Hotel, perched atop a Carpathian mountain and accessible only by a nearly vertical funicular railway. In the crumbling hotel, the author encounters Mr. Mustapha, the hotel's owner, in the archaic spa. Mustapha dines with the author and recounts to him the story of how he was once a lobby-boy in the hotel and has come to be the owner of the place. As in "The Shining", the hotel is as important a character in the film as any of the live actors and the sets depicting the place are gorgeous and lovingly detailed -- although after the manner of a child's doll-house. Anderson films almost everything frontally. When the characters interact,they speak directly into the camera. (The movie is laden with about two dozen cameo-like appearances by well-known actors and actresses -- there's Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Jude Law, etc.) The mise-en-scene is almost archaeological in form. The film looks like the movies of Louis Feuillade, pictures shot during the First World War such "The Vampires" and "Judex" that use box-like sets into which the viewer peers to pick out the details of the action occurring within these display-case dioramas. Even Anderson's action scenes are essentially static: mostly comprised of an overhead shot of a still landscape through which something moves at incredible velocity intercut with frontal shots of people riding motorcycles or bobsleds. Contributing to the film's impression that it is made from boxes inside boxes is a bold technical effect -- most of the picture is shot in the narrow rectangular aspect ratio of the old UFA studio pictures, the ratio of Fritz Lang's "Nibelungenlied" and Pabst's "Dreigroschenoper"; this means that the scenes have tall black columns on both sides of the image, an element that contributes to the viewer's sense that he or she is peering into a nativity scene or the brightly lit inside of a Faberge egg. The film is not merely an exercise in style: it has a distinct ethic -- the film celebrates loyalty and competency and posits the mountain-top Grand Budapest Hotel as a kind of ark, a hermitage where the last virtues of gallantry and civilization have been preserved against the barbarism running rampant on the German plains below. It's a wonderful movie, intentionally idiosyncratic, an artisan, craft-brewed picture -- I thought it was moving and fascinating and only a little bit "twee."

The Magic Flute

The Minnesota Opera Company's April 2014 production of "The Magic Flute" is exciting, wholly innovative, and wonderfully thought-provoking. Whether the approach to opera on display in this show, an import from the Berlin Komische Oper via the Los Angeles Opera company is another question. Opera is generally static: a few people standing rigidly in place and singing in the approximate direction of one another, although careful to remain facing the audience sufficiently to project their voices across the auditorium. The orchestra is hidden. Sometimes, there are processionals and recessionals that cross the stage and, on other occasions, a chorus will gather and, more or less, motionlessly address their massed voices to the spectators. In this production of Mozart's opera, the dimension in which the singers act is flattened to a plane -- this is consistent with the ordinary staging of opera and true to the form but here heightened to an extraordinary point. On this plane, animated images are projected. The singers emerge through the surface of the plane by various doorways that rotate to reveal the singers pinned against the surface of the screen. In many instances, the actors hover in mid-air, seemingly occupying tiny shelves like religious statues poised high above the floor of a church. (The effect is initially startling and a little frightening -- the players are pinned to the wall like butterfly speciments so that it appears that a single misstep would plunge them twenty or thirty feet to the stage floor; I suspect that the singers are somehow harnessed into their position and spun into visibility through the screen as if on a kind of rotating "lazy Susan".) The singers can't really move in most instance since their motions must be coordinated with images appearing alongside them on the screen -- they perform with gestures, straitjacketed against the flat plane on which the film is projected, their torsos and faces, painted white to catch the light, like cameos or ivory bas-relief slightly extruded from the screen. The effect is something like certain Disney films or Robert Zemeckis' "Whose Afraid of Roger Rabbit" -- that is, live three-dimensional characters interacting with cartoon interlocutors in a stylized cartoon landscape. The images projected alongside the actors are, often, extraordinarily interesting and present a challenging and idiosyncratic interpretation of the heavily symbolic (or allegorical) action comprising the opera. There is always something for the eye to decode, decipher, or enjoy: little ruby-red hearts emerge from singers who are like alabaster busts protruding just slightly from the screen and the little hearts as images of love, spin and dance, and sometimes burst and shatter. The Queen of the Night is a white Egyptian torso suspended atop thirty foot-long spider legs that are as sharply pointed as lances -- the legs twitch and dance as she sings and, sometimes, vertiginous webs appear beneath where the actress is embedded in the screen high above the stage. There are many interesting comical effects: Papageno drinks a cocktail through a straw from a huge martini glass and, then, sees pink elephants that prance around and menace him. Love duets are staged between figures encased by the screen and surrounded by blue flowers and yellow buzzing bees and flocks of little stylized birds that flit here and there -- the "birds and the bees," you see. The eponymous "magic flute" is represented, annoyingly, I thought, as a nude Tinker Bell and the magic bells are portrayed as a dozen plump little female CanCan dancers. The interaction between the live singers and the animation is often astounding and, even, thrilling. However, there is something claustrophobic about confining all action to a single dimension, perhaps, a yard wide and the approach has certain definite limitations -- one of the highlights of the opera is when the magic bells set Monostatos's black fiends helplessly prancing; in most productions, the menacing black figure suddenly become ridiculous and comical and are, literally, danced off-stage. In this show, the black army is portrayed as actors wearing big, bad wolf masks and, when the bells sound, they stand motionless in a row deployed against the screen while the animation projects women's legs, complete with garter belts below their waists daintily kicking and pirouetting. The effect is extraordinary, but it's also static and not really very funny. Furthermore, the animation imposes a very distinct interpretative scheme on the opera -- we are more or less told exactly what to think about the strange, masque-like proceedings. The animation is by an English avant-garde company called "1927" and they spoil the great reveal near the end of Act One -- that is, the revelation that the aggrieved Queen of the Night, who portrays herself as a mourning mother is, in fact, perhaps, the villain of this somewhat misognyistic opera. By depicting the Queen of the Night, from the outset, as a giant spider it's pretty clear what she means and how we are to view her -- and this, I think, ruins an important ambiguity in the opera. Even more idiosyncratic is the determination to treat the noble, if pedantically didactic Sarastro, as a giant robot-master. In this show, Sarastro wears a sinister top-hat and frock-coat, has followers that are dressed the same way, and appears like a frightening figure from E.T.A. Hoffmann (or "The Tales of Hoffmann"), something like the character that animated Coppelia, half Dr. Mabuse and half Anton Mesmer. Sarastro is associated with dozens of robotic animals -- monkeys and horses and, even, elephants all built from gears and clockwork. The concept is that Sarastro's version of the Enlightenment is all soul-less automatons: springs, intermeshed gears and apparatus, monstrous devices that bear huge eyes at their apex. This is completely opposed to Mozart's vision of Sarastro and his noble Freemason followers, but is, I think, a valid, if reductionist, interpretation of the opera. But if Sarastro is merely a Dr. Frankenstein, a sort of mad doctor leading an army of sinister robots, then, the ostensibly happy ending to this opera makes no sense. The animators understand this and, at the very end of the show, the imagery projected on the screen stutters, breaks down, and, then, the film seems to melt. In the default of the projected images, with the machine broken, the chorus steps forth, no longer in any kind of discernible costume and delivers Mozart's final sententious messages about love and virtue and brotherhood singing straight to the audience. It's like a breath of fresh air -- we get a sense of liberation from the all-encompassing machine, in this case, the animated projections that have trapped and confined the actors throughout the three-hour opera. This works well, but makes hash of Mozart's intentions, although, I suppose, extracting an interesting, if controversial, argument of this kind from this sort of staple of the operatic repertory is a good thing. Less successful is the staging of Sarastro's famous aria, "In diesem heiligen Halle" -- perhaps, the most noble and ennobling scene in the play. As Sarastro sings, the Masons dress the heroine in a resplendent gowns, the apparel of a Masonic adept, an extraordinary and generous gesture since the Order forbids women from being present at its rituals or entering its temple. The animation shows us this scene occurring a wall ripped and shredded with a dozen peeping eyes peering into the sacred space where the heroine is undressed and, then, clad in the Masonic raiments. This makes no sense and is completely contrary to the tenor of the aria and the scene. At the performance that I saw, the singers seemed intimidated by the technical innovations and, perhaps, frightened by the elaborate rotating mechanisms that slung them out over the stage floor. Harnessed and belted above the stage, they seemed half-afraid to sing loudly. Furthermore, the two opposing principles -- male and female -- were weak. "The Magic Flute" makes its points sonically -- Sarastro's implausibly deep basso profundo is poised against the Queen of the Night's ridiculously high-pitched coloratura arias. Here Sarastro couldn't quite hit the low notes: I couldn't hear the bottom pitches that he is forced to excavate out of his belly. And the Queen of the Night couldn't quite get the high notes either -- a shame in both instances. The show is a great experience: it revives Mozart for you and makes you worry about his opera and re-think its premises -- this is a wonderful thing, but as an opera, this production doesn't exactly work.

Birth

On the evidence of “Birth”, the British director Jonathan Glazer is one of cinema’s great stylists. Synthesizing image and music, and employing a gliding, precisely tracking camera, subtly reframing for emphasis, and exactly calibrating the ambience of settings and décor, Glazer’s 2004 film develops a portentous mood of elegant, hopeless obsession. Glazer is famous director of beer commercials and similar advertisements in his native England and, I suppose, it is no surprise that he wields camera and lighting with such remarkable aplomb. But, as with his commercial work, the question that “Birth” raises is whether his rather slight subject manner is worthy of such operatic splendor. In my view, “Birth” is strange enough, and sufficiently mysterious and beautiful, to justify Glazer’s icy Kubrick-influenced exactitude and, of course, we must recall that similar questions were raised about Kubrick’s later films as well -- does the enigmatic parable shown in “Eyes Wide Shut” really justify the glacial magnificence of the movie’s camerawork, costumes, and locations? The opening five or six minutes of “Birth” demonstrate that we are in the hands of master film-maker. We hear a voice-over, something about materialism and death, and, then, the camera tracks a man jogging through an icy, rocky landscape; the shot goes on and on and, then, suddenly, a pack of dogs emerges from the underbrush and trot across the man’s path, a curious detail that has nothing to do with the film, but which establishes a sense of unmediated reality at the heart of a highly stylized, even contrived, tracking shot. The jogger enters a tunnel and falls to the ground. We realize, perhaps, with a shock that this oddly desolate landscape is New York’s Central Park. The camera reframes the opening of the tunnel to suggest an oval birth-canal and, then, we see a newborn infant underwater at first, but, then, gently lifted into the light. All of this is staged to music that sounds something like a percussive version of Mahler. After this overture, we learn that a wealthy man, played by Danny Huston intends to marry Anna, Nicole Kidman in a performance that is both radiant and mournful. Anna is the widow of the man who we have seen collapsing in the tunnel in Central Park and, now, ten years has passed. At the birthday of Anna’s mother (Lauren Bacall), a little boy enters the party, confronts the assembled guests and claims that he is Sean, Anna’s dead husband, somehow reincarnated. The boy has an eerie flat affect and a broad, half-ugly face and he is so convinced that he is Anna’s husband that he claims to love her. The child has remarkably intimate information about Anna, knows her secrets and her family history, and, in one remarkable, scene, even, offers to make love to her. Gradually, Anna becomes obsessed with the boy and plans to flee with him. Her fiancée, needless to say is non-plussed, and driven to fury by his ten-year-old rival, attacks the boy at an elegant soiree, shoving a baby grand piano against the child and, then, beating him -- all to the embarrassed horror of the assembled guests and the musicians who were playing Lohengrin’s Wedding March when the affray erupted. As is often the case with films of this kind, the solution to the mystery is disappointing. But the uncanny effect of the strange child doesn’t really dissipate when the riddle is solved and, at the end of the movie, when Anna begs for the forgiveness of her smug, unimaginative fiance, and, then, marries him, we sense that she has not forgotten Sean, that she still loves him, and that the obsessive bond that links her to the boy, and through him to the ghost of her dead husband, will haunt her forever. The boy, although apparently disturbed and deluded, genuinely loves Anna and there is a scene in which the child nobly refuses to tell her how he has learned her secrets that is extremely moving -- we know what the boy’s enigmatic remarks mean, but Anna can’t decipher his statement: “I can’t be Sean because I love you.” Unlike some directors famous for their commercial work (for instance Ridley Scott), Jonathan Glazer is a tactful and excellent director of actors and respects their performances. He doesn’t cut unnecessarily and uses close-ups judiciously, preferring to frame stately tableaux of his wealthy, rather pretentious characters in their gorgeously appointed abodes. Two contrasting scenes show Glazer’s skill: in one scene, Nicole Kidman’s character stutters and struggles to express her conflicting feelings about Sean’s reincarnation as a rather grubby little boy -- she rolls her eyes, makes odd grimaces, and demonstrates an extraordinary range of expression: she seems to laugh at herself and her credulity, while, at the same time, her lips and eyes tremble on the verge of tears. There is a peculiar little motion she makes, brushing at her eyes, that is particularly indelible. It’s an extraordinary virtuosic set-piece, all performed in a single long take. No less astounding is a ninety-second shot in which the camera scrutinizes Kidman’s face while we hear the agitated notes of Wagner’s overture to “Die Walkuere” -- in this scene, the actress does nothing at all, but the viewer hears the music, considers the context, and, then, imputes meaning to Ms. Kidman’s expressionless features. The great critic, David Thomson, probably our best writer on film today, claims that “Birth” is a lost masterpiece, a great work that almost no one has seen. Whether this assertion is true is debatable. But, certainly, “Birth” is compelling, brilliantly acted -- the audience delights in seeing these smug, Wasp plutocrats confronting an ineffable mystery -- and a remarkable showcase for Glazer’s film technique.