Word: puccini
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Harvard Film Archive. Aki Kaurismaki's "La Vie de Boheme," an iconoclastic take on the novel which inspired Puccini, at 7 and 9 p.m. Carpenter Center...
...could be forgiven for thinking that "La Vie de Boheme," the latest film from Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, is a cinematic adaptation of Puccini's opera of almost the same name. The confusion shouldn't last long, though. The film's first scene cuts from a rooftop panorama of Paris to a shot of the starving writer Marcel (Andre Wilms) digging through a pile of trash, muttering "merde...
Even though both work from the same source, Henri Murger's 19th century novel Scenes de la vie de boheme, where Puccini draws his demi-monde of starving artists with heavy strokes of romantic melodrama, Kaurismaki chooses ironic distance and absurd comedy. The result is a witty but frustrating film, whose saving grace is the beauty of its images of Paris...
...film's rather homely Mimi (Evelyne Didi) isn't the fragile beauty of Puccini's opera, but she turns out to be just as consumptive. Her romance with Rodolfo is halfhearted; in a movie preoccupied with hunger, the couple's appetite for each other is depressingly dull. Musette (Christine Murillo) is so marginal to the film's action as to be an extra...
MAHLER CALLED HIM A GENIUS; Richard Strauss held him in awe; Puccini said he could give away half his talent and still have plenty left over. Schoenberg? Stravinsky? No, the recipient of these accolades was a wunderkind from Vienna named Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The son of the city's leading music critic, young Korngold had written a large body of music before he turned 15, including a piano sonata for Artur Schnabel, and achieved international success in 1920 at the age of 23 with his romantic opera Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City). It seemed possible that he would...