A scene from The Wagner Files.
Part of a five-episode German TV series on the lives of great artists, Ralf Pleger's The Wagner Files is also one corner of a triangular media platform that includes an iPhone app and an interactive graphic novel. Perhaps it's best experienced that way.
As a standalone TV documentary, Pleger's film is a furiously overwrought and often plain silly account of the great opera composer's life, which apparently included many women, a fetish for pink silk, mountains of bad credit, the lingering stink of anti-Semitism and – almost forgot – an opera or two.