November 26, 2006: Tristan "+" Isolde

As may have been observed in the past, I do not mind talking about how seriously I take my Wagner (particularly this season at the San Francisco Opera, where they mounted the Los Angeles production with Hockney sets and, as usual, the Chronicle got it all wrong and the performance was riveting from beginning to end). So I was more than a little skeptical when I saw the posters and newspaper adds for a film calling itself Tristan + Isolde, which seemed to make it clear that any contribution from Wagner would be, at best, irrelevant. Nevertheless, when Cinemax decided to run the film, my wife and I figured we would give it a try. (It's a lot easier to bail on a cable broadcast than a visit to a movie theater.) As a matter of fact, we jumped the gun when we saw that it was available through the Comcast On Demand feature prior to its first airing. Like acts2120, whose review appeared on the IMDB page, we were more than pleasantly surprised.

Nevertheless, I can see why this movie left San Francisco almost as soon as it arrived (and probably did not even arrive in many other cities). Even if this is one of the most highly-charged stories of sex and violence (not to mention one of the earliest), it is hard to imagine any telling of the tale "making it" as a "teen flick;" and teens constitute the market the dominates the logic of film distribution, if not conception and production. Most important is that this particular telling is not that all transparent. As a matter of fact, its greatest appeal may be to Wagner-lovers for the way in which it fills out the back-story. We see how Tristan came to be part of Marke's household, and we learn about Isolde's betrothal to Morholt. We also see the blood-and-guts (and lots of dirt) battle where Tristan slays Morholt and is wounded so badly that he is taken for dead. Like that of any dead hero, his body is placed on a boat and floated out to sea. It then washes up on the Irish coast and the story goes pretty much the way Isolde tells it in the first act of the Wagner opera (with one interesting exception, which is that it is Isolde who gives a false name, calling herself Bragnae, rather than Tristan).

Another problem involves sorting out the characters. Since most of the performers are pretty unfamiliar, it is too easy to confuse Morhold with Kurseval, which is a pretty drastic confusion! Also, Marke ages by cutting his hair almost to the skull, making him hard to recognize when we move from the scene in which he adopts the child Tristan to the time in which most of the story takes place. On the other hand Rufus Sewell portrays a Marke who is far from over the hill and could have been an excellent match for Isolde.

By the way there are no magic potions here. Isolde is an herbalist (and, interestingly enough, so is Morholt). Her passion for Tristan is a natural one, and in this telling she keeps it pent up far longer than Wagner's Isolde did. (Well, "pent up" was probably not in Wagner's working vocabulary!) The result is that her first serious tryst with Tristan makes for the sort of earth-moving encounter that the legend wants it to be.

Finally (and this may be the real reason why this movie had no chance of grabbing the teen market), there is a certain "meta-level" to the way in which the legend is told. It is as much a reflection on a familiar tale as it is a telling of that tale. Since the teen market does not go to the movies to reflect, my guess is that the studio bean-counters knew from the start that this was a losing prospect.

This last problem has been sticking in my mind now that I have read Daniel Mendelsohn's New York Review piece on Marie Antoinette. It almost seemed as if Mendelsohn was taking Coppola to task for not being reflective enough about her familiar subject. However, since Coppola is no stranger to that "Hollywood logic," you have to wonder how much she deserves to be Mendelsohn's target, even if it is her name on the credits. I have no trouble imagining that most of the things Mendelsohn disliked most about the film were actually committee decisions, where the bean-counters had the strongest voices, in which case it may be better to wait to see if a "director's cut" version ever gets released on DVD.