Word: sarastro
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Bergman took up the challenge here, too. He has cooked up a few plot devices in an effort to give the tale some grit and human motivation, and comes dangerously close to melodrama. About halfway through the film we learn that Sarastro, High Priest of the Temple, was once the Queen of the Night's consort, is actually Pamina's father, and has snatched her from her mother's clutches out of paternal concern for her own good. According to the original text this is all wrong. The High Priest is traditionally a somewhat remote cult figure; here...
...characters are superbly drawn. Lit from front and back simultaneously so that his hair glows around him like a halo, Sarastro is presented as a wise, paternal New Testament God. The Queen is very female and very nasty, the kind of role Bette Davis made unforgettable. Her malevolent, teeth-gnashing character is a product of the Mason's profound anti-female bias (as Sarastro explains the abduction to Pamina: "You need a man to guide you."). Prince Tamino, the initiate-to-be, has both ineffable simplicity and moral sturdiness. A trusting character, he's not terribly bright. He understands nothing...
...into a vast mosaic of human faces (cutting to the beat of the music), and he returns obsessively to a belond angelic little girl who by some odd coincidence looks a lot like Liv Ullman and a touch like Bergman himself. Between acts his camera wanders around backstage, where Sarastro reads the score to Wagner's Parsifal, the Queen of the Night drags grimly on a cigarette, a court page reads comic books, and the two lovers play checkers in a coy parody of The Seventh Seal...
When Tamino and Pamina embrace at the end, Bergman has the magic flute fly from Tamino's hand into Sarastro's, a lovely metaphor of universal regeneration, both of life...
...quite as effective as Bergman's dramatic conception, which is to stage the opera like an 18th century production. Many scenes take place within the confines of a proscenium arch. Bergman even emphasizes the theatricality of the occasion by providing a few glimpses of the performers off stage: Sarastro studying Parsifal, Papageno asleep in his dressing room and almost missing his en trance cue. Curtains rise and descend, flats rumble away to be replaced by others of equally splendid artificiality...