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The prelude mixes Lola Montez the historical mistress and Dietrich's Lola-Lola, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg analytical like Chuck Jones (cf. Bugs Bunny as Brunhilde). Ludwig II (Harry Baer), Bavarian heir, dreamer, builder, squanderer, magpie, cuckoo-clock figurine, archangel. "Let us listen to their kingly babble." Part One, The Curse. Valkyries (Das Rheingold) are hoochie-coochie wrigglers, the court is a rear-projection effect, kitsch for "the monarch of kitsch." Wacky brother Otto (Sigi Graue) takes over the throne after a cabinet of waxworks banishes Ludwig to the grottos of Part Two, Once Upon a Time I Was. The purpose is to send Rossellini's period recreations to Mars, shifts in film texture (a moon-faced peasant delivers a monologue through a syrupy coat of amber) are the norm. The list of Special Guest Phantoms includes the Empress Elisabeth, a tangoing Hitler, and Karl May escorted by a lipsticked Winnetou. Wagner is the Rhine's sad, overthrown father, and, mimed by Gerhard Maerz and Anette Tirier, just the hermaphroditic aesthete to give birth to Ludwig. "Did he exist, or did we create him as our fantasy?" Legend is the people's opium, art is "the serenest form of existence," Boucher and Fragonard canvases become his majesty's oversized dioramas while Tristan and Isolde is something for him to doze off to. The interminable sleigh ride through the frigid countryside is a key sensation, like a dilation from The Magnificent Ambersons. (Snowflakes fall, or are they sawdust?) A fairy-tale about culture, identity, sacred monsters and "the mystical and unknowable" effect of earfuls from the Lone Ranger radio show erupting into a Germanic tessitura. Syberberg's creatures live and die by such paradisiacal simulacra—Ludwig is sent to the guillotine only to be revived as a yodeling Camp emblem. With Ingrid Caven, Peter Kern, Oscar von Schab, Edgar Murray, Ursula Strätz, Hanna Köhler, and Günther Kaufmann.
--- Fernando F. Croce |