Word: bergmans
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...Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute, always cited as the best-realized opera film prior to Don Giovanni, neatly sidestepped all the conceptual problems of the hybrid genre--it pretended to be a filmed record of a performance in a provincial opera house, with shots of the audience thrown in to be sure you understood the universality of Mozart's message. Losey never wavers from his no-holds-barred outdoors staging, using the Palladio villas near Vicenza as an occasional refuge from the bright sun that over-exposes many of the scenes...
...wheatfield. In Don Giovanni, when the camera zooms in on a singer's mouth, the voice becomes more distinct and louder--and you can tell simply by listening whether a singer is indoors or out. Losey's dubbing technique, too, seems more precise and less distracting than most, including Bergman's. Only one singer, Malcolm King as Masetto, suffers from the "disconnected mouth" disease endemic to filmed singers...
Despite the musical ambition implicit in the international cast and the Paris Opera name (Bergman used an all-Swedish cast for his Magic Flute), this Don Giovanni is musically undistinguished. Lorin Maazel's conducting sounds muddy and sluggish throughout--which could easily be the fault of the Exeter Street's Rocky Horror-blasted sound system. None of the singers does very much of the ornamentation most music scholars today believe was a critical part of performances in the composer's time. Most of all, there's a surprisingly lackadaisical air about Mozart's music as Losey presents it--as though...
...beyond the usual filmed operatic performances or made-for-TV studio productions. Joseph Losey (The Servant, The Go-Between) takes his cast of international singing stars out on location to the waterways of Venice and to some stunning Palladian villas in the countryside around Vicenza. Never mind that Ingmar Bergman's 1975 version of Mozart's The Magic Flute showed what enchanting results a modest, studio-bound production could achieve. Never mind, too, that the locale of the Don Juan legend and the setting of Mozart's opera is not Italy but Spain. The real problem...
MARRIED. Martin Scorsese, 36, American film director (Taxi Driver, Mean Streets); and Italian Actress-Journalist Isabella Rossellini, 27, daughter of Screen Star Ingrid Bergman and the late director Roberto Rossellini; he for the third time, she for the first; in Bracciano, Italy, with Actor Robert De Niro as best...