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Title: A great collaboration between an old master and a new one
Review: Ingmar's Bergman's film of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute proves that film makers are not all complete narcissists: Bergman filmed a performance of Mozart's opera in a small Swedish opera house (and the performance is in Swedish, not the usual German) and he kept to the performance with laudable restraint. There are some wonderful shots of people in the audience as they wait for the curtain to go up, and the camera returns to one little girl several times during the action, but otherwise, what you see is the opera that the audience saw. It is a good staging and a lovely performance of a curiously moving opera that no one seems really to understand. The three children in a hot-air balloon, the good spirits, are especially moving.
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