Word: grail
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SOME OF US, the sensible ones, never doubted that Monty Python had an inside line on the meaning of life. Then again some of us run out of tingers when we try to count the number of times we saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Some of us laugh at just about every muscle twitch in John Cleese face. We even snicker at the very approximate "John Cleese imitation" attempted by his cohorts Michael Palen and Terry Jones (Palin sat on Jones's shoulders) before a screening last week of the troupe's latest cinematic venture...
...blind devotion couldn't quite obscure the sustained flat moments in every one of the troupe's movies following Holy Grail Unfortunately, schtick after schtick failed to approach the inspired idiocy that King Arthur and his knights achieved in that film, Rewriting the Gospels (Life of Brian) offered promise, but on film even the madcap Pythoneers seemed to hold themselves back under the weight of their own irreverence. Modeled after a Lewis Carroll poem. Jabberwocky deteriorated into nerve-deadening blood and gore. A romp through time and space with a seven-year-old (Time Bandits) fell into the saddest trap...
...start mugging at the camera, the material they're acting becomes supremely irrelevant. When Terry Jones dresses up as an old crone this time as a sort of Mother Hubbard, dancing and singing with her 90 ragged children--he she looks exactly like 39 other Jones crones from Holy Grail or earlier. And fortunately, the gag is just as ridiculous the fortieth time around. There must be some deeper meaning to life--even Monty Python says so--but with all the commotion from the dancing goldfish and waiters and children and file cabinets, it's hard to put your finger...
...heaviest symbolism, however, is Freudian, understandable in an opera about a sacred fraternity of chaste knights who guard the Holy Grail against a lustful, profane world. Syberberg revels in the obvious sexual metaphors of the spear and the wound that will not heal; the wound, which is supposed to be in Amfortas' side, is a disembodied thing that lies ulcerating on a bed next to the suffering knight. Most startling of all is the changing of Parsifal from a man (Michael Kutter) into a woman (Karen Krick) at the moment he rejects the erotic advances of the temptress Kundry...
...years later; Chéreau's Ring seems less outrageous than adventurous, and it has influenced succeeding productions of Wagner at Bayreuth. Syberberg's daring Parsifal, on the other hand, is likely to become a curiosity. Truly cinematic opera remains a Grail-like goal, waiting for its own Parsifal to redeem the promise of artistic salvation...