Word: losey
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...decent opera films. Movie theater sound systems couldn't deliver the dynamic range of operatic performances without unbearable distortion; directors didn't know how to dub singing voices convincingly; the acting of singers showed embarassing flaws under the close scrutiny of the movie camera. Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni is remarkable not because it records a worthy performance--it's rifled with musical problems of evert sort--but because it solves the worst of the artistic problems that have kept opera off the screen. With any luck future directors will be able to use Losey's film as a manual...
...Mozart's great finale, the statue arrives at the Don's supper as an agent of divine retribution. But there is no room for theology, or even for the supernatural, in the class struggle. Losey, after underplaying the hair-raising moment when the statue first speaks, dissipates its horrific arrival by treating it almost as a hallucination. Then, in one of his most bizarre touches, a glass blower's open furnace-first seen during the overture-materializes once again in the Don's house and engulfs him, in a sort of industrial accident. Don Giovanni does...
...buffo scalawag that Mozart and Da Ponte had in mind. Edda Moser as Donna Anna, Teresa Berganza as Zerlina, Kenneth Riegel as Don Ottavio, all throw themselves into their roles with intensity, but only the exotic Kiri Te Kanawa, as Donna Elvira, manages to shake off some of Losey's heavy seriousness. Missing are the wit and verve, the "elate darting rhythms" with which Shaw said Mozart conveyed the spirit of the work. Here the music is not as much help as it might be, since Lorin Maazel conducts it with such grim, unrelenting drive. (The complete soundtrack...
...settings are truly lovely-symmetrical Palladian porticoes, marbled rooms with glowing frescoes and statuary, formal gardens opening on cypress-dotted vistas. Losey scatters the action of the opera over every photogenic square foot of them. Characters grope endlessly down pillared corridors, wander around outdoors and are unaccountably set afloat on gondolas. Consecutive scenes shift disconcertingly from nighttime to broad daylight and back again. Most of the music is lip-synched to a prerecorded track; inside or out, wind or rain, we hear the souped-up ambience of the recording studio. The result is that characters who ought to be interacting...
...Losey adds one character not found in the original, a mysterious young valet in black who hovers wordlessly in virtually every scene of the Don's, often exchanging intimate glances with him. A nemesis? An illegitimate son? A homosexual lover? (A dubious motif also suggested by the epicene revelers at the Don's supper.) The figure, mimed with sullen sensuality by Eric Adjani (Isabelle's brother), remains cryptic and annoyingly gratuitous. He does, however, make a perfect emblem for Losey's whole approach. This Don Giovanni deserves the old line once used by Dorothy Parker...