Sounds and Sweet Airs

By JAY COCKS

THE MAGIC FLUTE Directed and Written by INGMAR BERGMAN

This is an occasion: genius is served.

Ingmar Bergman treats Mozart's opera with spirit, reverence and understanding. In this adaptation of The Magic Flute, the director makes the work his own without ever violating it. Mozart is renewed, enhanced; Bergman is triumphant.

Lest the movie sound rarefied, it should be added that The Magic Flute is a wonderful bit of sorcery, passionate, elegant and lighthearted. Anyone with a cultural prejudice against opera, a suspicion of its loftier excesses, will be immediately disarmed. Opera fans will be delighted. And audiences who are simply looking for a good movie will find in The Magic Flute the most beguiling offering of the year.

Exuberant Confusion. Bergman first saw the opera when he was twelve and was so enthralled that he wanted to mount a production in his marionette theater (an idea that was finally thwarted because he could not afford the 78 r.p.m. records). The Magic Flute contains some of Mozart's most glorious music but has a truly unmanageable libretto. Staunch knights, knot-headed serfs, mythological animals and cunning spirits amble around, stumbling over plot threads about thwarted romance and Freemasonry. One of Bergman's accomplishments is to take all this rich confusion, condense it by about 40 minutes and turn it into a pageant that is exuberant without ever being excessive.

In the film, the plot seems straightforward. Tamino (Josef Kostlinger), a knight pure of heart but uncertain of course, is enticed by the Queen of the Night (Birgit Nordin) and her handmaidens into abducting her daughter Pamina (Irma Urilla) from the palace of Sarastro (Ulrik Cold). Sarastro, once the Queen's husband, is dabbling in some dark arts that turn out to be nothing more mysterious than the rites of Freemasonry. Tamino is aided in his quest by a forester named Papageno (Hakan Hagegard), whose robust cowardice at times of stress provides comedy relief. The two men, sensing they have been duped by the Queen of the Night, give themselves over to Sarastro's trial of honor. Their reward is true love: Tamino is immediately enamored of Pamina, Papageno swept away by a fey creature named Papagena (Elisabeth Eriksson).

The Magic Flute is traditionally considered an exaltation of the power of love. It is also about the transcendence of art and the liberating force of imagination -- themes Bergman underscores.

Papageno's bells, Tamino's magic flute are talismans against the darkness. For Bergman, they are forces, as certain and necessary as love, to hold back the night.

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 and art.

Purists may be disconcerted to hear The Magic Flute sung in Swedish instead of German. The music is well per formed, but it is never 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.

Blithe Innocence. Far from being just directorial legerdemain -- though they are that -- such touches reflect Bergman's continual preoccupation with the stuff of illusion. This obsession links such disparate films as The Magician (1959) and Persona (1966). There are soft shadows of many other Bergman scenes and themes: Papageno and Papagena's indomitable exuberance recalls the peasant couple at the end of The Seventh Seal (1956); the air of blithe innocence and sudden mystery evokes the elegant reveries of Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).

Thanks again to Bergman's usual collaborator, Cinematographer Sven Nykvist, The Magic Flute is ravishing to look at. The acting is exceptional, partly be cause the performers have been allowed to concentrate on nuance rather than volume. The music was recorded separately, so that when the sing ers open their mouths to sing, the action is as natural and spontaneous as if they were speaking. During the overture and between scenes, Bergman cuts to faces in the audience, returning continually to one, the wondering, wise countenance of a girl who seems ageless. Recalling the director's childhood memories of the opera, she could serve as a surrogate for Bergman and perhaps for all of us. In her is reflected the joy and wisdom of The Magic Flute, which Bergman has captured here forever.

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