All cheap seduction in Tristan & Isolde

[img1]There is nothing quite like the exquisite pain of a tragic love story. The love triangle of Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere, and the doomed romance between Romeo and Juliet are staples of the Western canon for a reason. They speak to something deep within us: the desire for passionate, all-consuming love and the fear that we will find it and have it taken away.

Tristan & Isolde, adaptated from a story dating to the Middle Ages, builds on similar themes. Tristan (James Franco) is a young Englishman left for dead by his comrades after a violent battle. He washes up on the coast of Ireland, where he's discovered by Isolde (Sophia Myles), the daughter of the Irish king and his sworn enemy. She conceals her identity and nurses him back to health, and as she does the two fall in love with each other.

But Tristan is forced to flee back to England to escape capture by the Irish. He returns some time later to compete in a tournament as the champion of Lord Marke, his uncle (Rufus Sewell). The prize is the hand of Isolde in marriage, which he is determined to win for his uncle, but his real motive in returning is to find the woman he fell in love with, still not knowing that the two women are the same person.

Of course he wins the tournament, only to discover, to his horror, the true identity of his uncle's prize. Bound by duty and love for his kind-hearted uncle, he returns with Isolde to his home, where she and his uncle are wed. The two lovers are not able to remain apart for long, though, and soon Tristan and Isolde clandestine resume their relationship, all the while afraid of being caught by Lord Marke.

Seldom is a filmmaker presented with such a wonderful premise around which to base a film. In the best of all possible worlds, these story elements would have been built up slowly and painstakingly. We would see Tristan and Isolde slowly fall in love with each other, only to be torn apart, and when they begin their affair, hidden from the eyes of Lord Marke, the dread would have built and built, then built some more until the whole thing erupted in glorious recrimination and betrayal.

Unfortunately, Tristan & Isolde was directed by Kevin Reynolds (Waterworld, Robin Hood: Princes of Thieves), and he simply isn't able to bring the subtle touch needed by the material. The film is awkwardly photographed and haphazardly edited, with far too many close-ups and fast cuts, the result of which is that one never gets a sense for the environment the characters inhabit. The shots are full of ill-advised focus pulls utterly lacking in subtlety, and the action sequences are chopped up to the point of incoherence.

The script presents additional difficulties. The dialogue sounds too modern (ie: flat and inexpressive), and the story is directionless and poorly paced. When Tristan and Isolde are falling in love, it happens so fast that we don't feel it along with them, and the result is that when they finally meet again, there's no sense of the lovers reuniting because we were never deeply affected by original their feelings for each other.

All of this combines to make it very difficult to lose oneself in the story. Tristan & Isolde ends up feeling more like a historical reenactment than actually being transported to another time, which is what we need to feel for the film to succeed.

There are moments in the film, here and there, where things come together temporarily and we see what might have been. A scene involving the now-married Lord Marke and Isolde trying to convince Tristan that he needs to meet a girl has some wonderful wordplay involving the text and subtext of the dialogue. But these moments serve only to highlight the failings of the larger part of the film, and that is a tragedy in itself.