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Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the Magician)
'An end with fear, a highly fatal end. Yet a liberating end.' This is how Thomas Mann wrapped up his 1930 tale of Mario und der Zauberer, one of the first and most forceful literary statements on the rise of fascism. Words which, in spite of everything, are full of hope for human reason. More than 60 years later, film writer Burt Weinshanker and director Klaus Maria Brandauer, with the benefit of hindsight, see this hope as lost. Their very free interpretation of Mann ends in gloomy resignation.
Often films adapted from books do not fulfil a reader's pre-conceived ideas. The images on the screen somehow always fail to match up with one's own imagination and Mario und der Zauberer is no exception. But when it successfully manages to free itself from the written text, while keeping the fundamental content intact, it becomes one of the most enjoyable, stylish and politically exciting German films of recent times.
The film keeps the story in its original time frame - the 1920s - but its message deals in a modern manner with the problems of intolerance, racism and the political drift to the right. The film stars Anna Galiena and Julian Sands with director Brandauer as the magician Cipolla handling the philosophical argument successfully and with a lot of feeling. The presence of Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai, who was behind the camera when Brandauer rose to prominence in the Istvan Szabo trilogy (Mephisto, Colonel Redl, Hanussen), adds considerably to the artistic level of one of the most powerful German films of recent years.
Peter Claus (FIPRESCI)
Prod co: Provobis, Hamburg Prod: Juergen Haase
Dir: Klaus Maria Brandauer
Scr: Burt Weinshanker, adapted from the novel by Thomas Mann Ph: Lajos Koltai
Ed: Tanja Schmidbauer
Prod des: Peter Pabst
Costumes: Eckhard Kindermann, Doris Humnius
Music: Christian Brandauer Sound: Walter Amann
Cast: Julian Sands, Anna Galiena, Jan Wachtel, Nina Schweser, Pavel Greco, Rolf Hoppe, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Valentina Chico, Klaus Maria Brandauer Running time: 127 mins
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