Word: mozarts
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...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...
...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 the added visual verisimilitude could take some of the burden off the music and let the singers take it easy for a change...
...Mozart and Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte created an enormously alluring, vital protagonist who pursues his appetites with cheerful disregard for law or morality. After forcing himself on a noblewoman, Donna Anna, he duels with her father, the Commendatore, and kills him. Then, while the Don busies himself mostly with trying to seduce the peasant girl Zerlina, Donna Anna joins forces with her fiancé Don Ottavio and another of the Don's conquests, Donna Elvira, to hound him through a series of comic entanglements, disguises and escapes. When a statue of the slain Commendatore comes to life and challenges...
...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...
...extravagant humor in the recital of the Don's conquests by his servant Leporello, with the list stretching down the steps of his house and out into the garden; but José Van Dam's engaging Leporello is scarcely allowed to become the 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...