by Douglas Messerli
Michael Brynntrup (screenwriter and director) Narziss und
Echo (Narcissus and Echo) / 1989
The always clever German filmmaker
Michael Brynntrup begins his Narziss und Echo with the following
statement:
“A film in the form of a riddle is a
special kind of entertainment film where the film’s content must be deduced
from the film’s structure.”
She applies her lipstick, handing it over to one of her domestics (the
duo played by the twins Patricia and Sylvia Jung), when there is a knock on her
door.
Outside stands Narcissus’ two domestics (two male twins, Carsten and
Rolf Grunwald) who hand her their master’s calling card. Echo waves them to
permit him to enter.
Narcissus (Helge Musial) strides forward
with great confidence. He kneels before her, asking for her forgiveness, and
she offers her hand, telling him to say nothing. Bending to kiss her hand, he
instead pulls her fingers into his mouth. Shocked by the act, she stands and
slaps him as he pulls her close to him in a deep embrace, she pulling away,
declaring she hates him, and sends him away. He leaves but not before grabbing
up her alabaster image of him and
tossing it to the floor where it breaks into fragments.
It is now Spring, and Echo is sexually
aroused and certainly on the prowl as she determines to visit Narcissus. As she
moves to the palace she is seen between three stone curvatures of the wall,
reminding us of her own three ladies in waiting. But when she reaches her
lover’s palace he is nowhere to be found, she calling out to him in repetitions
of his name: “Narziss, Narziss.” Only his domestics appear, barely responding
to the visitor, far too busy as they are with their own lovemaking, images as
they are of one another.
After a number of calls, Echo begins to
lose her voice but encounters the two servants on the grand staircase, who
finally greet her (and incidentally alternate from being both dressed in white
tights to one dressed in white, the other in black). Narcissus stands now as a
stone stature looking at his former “real” image trapped in the mirror, in his
time apart from Echo having fallen in love clearly with his own image.
When Echo gets a glimpse of what has
happened she faints upon the stairs and from thence forward can only repeat
part of what Narcissus has to say about the situation of her having come to him
in desire, just as he in the first act, had come to her.
“Here, here,” Echo responds.
…. “Come, let us get together!”
“…get together, together,” repeats Echo.
His domestics campily add, “together,” looking intensely at one another
and beginning to sing a little song made up of the words.
Finally looking down up her as she sits up with hands in hands in the
air, Narcissus shouts out “Keep your hands to yourself,” repeating the words.
His serving boys sing another song about “hands to yourself.”
“I gave you a chance at me,” responds Echo, suddenly realizing the
import of her words.
We suddenly see Echo back at her vanity putting on her makeup and
Narcissus now plays the game, “I love me not, I love me” upon his fingers,
predictably ending with “I love me.”
Back in her boudoir, the three ladies mock her with three calls of
“Cheersy” as they toast her with glasses of champagne. She stands, knocking her
glass off the same stanchion where Narcissus’ stature had formerly been, her
glass breaking into fragments.
Bynntrup’s quite brilliant short work is both a campy and a totally
serious retelling of the myth using, of course, the answer to the not very
difficult riddle, pattern and repetition.
Los Angeles, November 20, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November
2022).
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