Quest

Since it went into production several years ago, we've heard surprisingly little about director-actor Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute. That it was an "updating" that put the story and action in a World War I setting, and that conductor James Conlon was doing the musical honors along with stellar bass-baritone René Pape is pretty much all we knew about it.

Then, yesterday, we read Sunday's piece on the film by Los Angeles Times classical music critic Mark Swed that explained, sort of, why we'd heard so little about it. Writes Mr. Swed:

[The film] was made in 2006 as part of an extensive international celebration of Mozart's 250th birthday. That spring, just as the Salzburg Festival was gearing up to stage every one of Mozart's 22 operas and when no civilized city with an opera house was without Mozart, Branagh's film was shown at Cannes, out of competition but with hopes of attracting distribution. It didn't succeed.

Shown at the Toronto and Venice film festivals four months later, Branagh's Flute was not disliked, but it failed to generate much enthusiasm. Since then the film has had limited release in parts of Europe, Asia and South America and has been moderately well received. French and British DVD versions have been released. But the film has never been shown in the United States, and there is no word about a domestic DVD.

Mr. Swed did manage to finally get his hands on a DVD of the film in Amsterdam, and found it to be "a joy."

Uh-huh. Pretty much par for the course for Mr. Swed, we thought, who seems to have a penchant for finding many of the grotesque outrages of Regietheater to be "a joy."

Ho-hum. BAU.

Then, further down, we read these intriguing grafs:

Branagh's Flute fascinatingly re-imagines Mozart's opera. All the music is intact and excellently conducted by James Conlon, music director of Los Angeles Opera. The English actor and humorist Stephen Fry translated the German libretto into colloquial English and supplied pertinent new dialogue. The cast is attractive. Young characters are played by young singers. Good teeth must have been a priority of the filmmaker.

Branagh's vision of the Great War is awful and magical at the same time, which is very strange and surely British. The film opens with bright sun, lush fields and bouncy soldiers in the trenches. This is cinema with a smile as big as [Ingmar] Bergman's, but the sweetness doesn't last. During the overture's development, soldiers charge, shells blast, bodies fly. No composer dealt with darkness and light quite like Mozart, and Branagh is on continual lookout for every mood flick.

Branagh has a deft touch with Mozartean contrasts between magic and realism. Half fairy tale, half war drama, the film also goes its own way. Sometimes Branagh supplies reason where Mozart relied on fantasy, and other times he takes the opposite route. The dragon becomes threatening poison gas. Papageno is the birdman whose pigeons test the air underground. Actual flutes, though, fly. The Queen of the Night arrives atop a tank and later darts through the sky like a kinky Tinkerbell. Surreal lips fly in space. So do Mary Poppins umbrellas.

Uh, OK. Now you've got our attention.

Off we go to Netflix posthaste.

Nothing.

Amazon.

Nothing.

Out of sheer desperation, we head over to that rich mine of the weird and wonderful, YouTube, to see whether anyone has pirated a clip or ten from the film.

Pay dirt!

Here's the film's opening sequence with music by Mozart (the overture to the opera) and images by Branagh.

And here's the scene of Papageno's meeting with Monostatos.

OK. Just those two did it for us (there are more excerpts on YouTube).

WE WANT TO SEE THIS FILM (or a DVD of same)!

NOW!

We're going on a hunting expedition.

Stay tuned.