I had known the essence of the story since I was a schoolboy: a Cornish knight, Tristan, or Sir Tristram, had been sent out to Ireland to bring home to Cornwall an Irish bride, Isolde, to marry King Marke of Cornwall. The young knight and the princess fall in love, despite their painful awareness of their duty both to the political circumstances and the laws of chivalry, facilitated at least in part by the love potion that was to be administered to the girl to prepare her for marriage to the older King Marke. The potion has the tragic effect of making her fall (even more firmly) in love with the young knight Tristan. The story grinds to its inevitable end, made palatable sometimes, and more painful at other times, by the intense poetic sensibilities of the young lovers, the fussing and blundering loyalty of Isolde’s nurse and maid, Bragnae (or Brangane, in some stories), and numerous details that are inserted by various writers who have retold this tale, to sharpen the edge of the tragedy.
In many ways, having known of the legend since childhood, I was certain that I could not be as moved by the story as I had been as a child. Richard Wagner, too, had written one of his greatest operas based on this story, but that same opera had, in my mind, made the legend useless for all other writers and operattists, simply because Wagner extracted every iota of agony from the story in a score that is considered bloated and self-indulgent by some, and magnificent by others.
A problem with Wagner operas is that they transport medieval stories to some glorious sound-stage in the sky, where the action refers to familiar historic --or legendary-- events, but what one sees is so stylized that only the music saves it from being totally ludicrous. Cinema, meanwhile, has succeeded in many instances in presenting period scenes which are more convincing each year. Despite their heavy-handedness, Cecil B. De Mille’s representations of Roman times set a certain standard of realism that subsequent productions have to beat. I have always said that Monty Python’s Holy Grail, despite the relentless parody and pantomime, realized on the screen my own mental image of those terrible times. In contrast with the lush beauty of The Agony and The Ecstasy, and Romeo and Juliet, for instance, films set in medieval Britain have been, at least half of them, successful at depicting the contrast between the life at court, and the life of the peasants, and the contrast between the depiction of life at court in fairy-tale films such as Camelot, and in later movies which showed a more realistic, less stainless-steel-stylish view of knights and their ladies.
Tristan and Isolde, 2006, presents a step towards realism, even if it stops from going so far towards historical realism as to make the movie unwatchable. I’m probably reacting to the fact that the principals act and behave very much in line with the characters as they existed in my mind, which of course is not saying a lot. James Franco and Sophia Myles, who have the title roles, are perfect, and so is earnest King Marke, and the anxious Bragnae (played by Bronagh Gallagher). There are the usual horrible medieval bullies with their poison-dipped swords, and so forth --after all, one of the main messages of the story is about better living with medieval chemistry-- and enough locker-room humor to keep the men from going out for a cigarette and not coming back. Sophia Myles has a brilliant way of being the beautiful girl next door, who would or would not give you the time of day depending on her mood. Both the young lovers are people one could fall in love with (if one was the appropriate gender, I suppose), and I was so in love that --- I could not watch the ending. So this review is written under false pretenses. One of these days, I will watch the whole thing, and suffer. Three thumbs up!
[Below is a link to a fragment from the prelude to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.]
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