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December 22, 2005

The Magic Fiddle

Ladies in Lavender (2004), a great film with Maggie Smith and Judy Dench, is a fairy tale with many archetypal parallels to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Substitute a violin for the wooden flute: The flute had been carved by Pamina’s father and given to Tamino by her mother, just as the paternal Adam (whose name implies "father") Penruddocke gives his violin to Andrea – both instruments proving the means of salvation for the respective heroes.

Both opera and film begin with a princely youth in trouble. Andrea, in his escape from the Nazis, is shipwrecked in a storm and rescued by two ladies, benign versions of the Three Ladies of the opera -- who discover Tamino, having escaped a dragon, lying unconscious in the forest. (In the original staging, the monster from which Tamino is fleeing is a serpent; in "Ladies in Lavender," there's a scene about an hour into the film where a fisherman throws an eel at Andrea, who flinches in fright.) The epynomous "ladies" are Janet and Ursula, elderly sisters who immediately become obsessed with the handsome stranger and compete to take care of him. Andrea is released from their proprietary hold by the beautiful Olga, a Pamina figure, with whom, it turns out, he shares a common language (German, no less). At the end of the film, Olga delivers him from the spell, as it were, of the sisters’ clutch (Dench’s clench?), straight into the Apollonian world of music, and to her brother Boris, a Sarastro figure of probity and renown. It is here that Andrea proves himself as a fitting successor to the maestro.

There are further echoes: the inappropriately seductive Dr. Mead, who is in hot pursuit of Olga, is like the Moor Monostatus who's always after Pamina; the buffoonish housekeeper Dorcas, a comic character often seen eating, is like the birdcatcher Papagano (she has a brief to-do with a magpie; and in one hilarious scene clumsily stuffs a chicken for dinner).

There’s even an echo of Pamina's portrait--which appears at the beginning of the opera and arouses Tamino’s love--in Olga’s small painting of Andrea which, at film's end, lends a kind of wistful closure to Janet’s possessiveness and Ursula’s impossible crush. The penultimate scene is of Andrea’s magnificent London debut. The full house and the conductor on the concert stage are reminiscent of Sarastro's golden realm--maestro, priests and devotees--into which Tamino arrives with great pomp. There's a final brief scene in each; in the film, the sisters leave the concert hall and literally fade away; in the opera, the Queen of the Night and her entourage dissolve, overcome by Sarastro's power. In both film and opera there’s a sense of passing the baton, as it were, from master to disciple, and a righting of circuitous destiny.

Posted by Jane on December 22, 2005 11:07 AM

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