Word: ruggero
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When I read that Ruggero Raimondi's Don Giovanni was passionless, I, as one of many whose bones turned to water watching his performance, knew the reviewer...
...Ruggero Raimondi's Don is a middle-aged, thin-lipped, white-faced sadist, a man more easily pictured flogging cats than seducing women. Raimondi fits in well with Losey's class-conscious interpretation of Da Ponte's text--he sees Don Giovanni as the consummate self-indulgent aristocrat. There's nothing wrong with coloring the opera this way, but Raimondi and Losey paint over and obliterate the other half of Don Giovanni's character, the youthful embodiment of unbounded energy who mesmerized the romantics. They do Mozart and Da Ponte an injustice by simplifying the libretto's psychological tangle...
...cynical, depleted ancìen régime and the exploited lower orders. He tacks on an epigraph from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: ". . . the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." His Don, solemnly played by Ruggero Raimondi, is a joyless, brooding creature whose compulsive sexuality is merely a neurotic reflection of social tensions. Losey gives us the least passionate seducer on film since Fellini's curiously chilly portrait of Casanova a couple of years...
...SPECIAL DAY Directed by Ettore Scola Screenplay by Ruggero Maccari, Ettore Scola and Maurizio Costanzo...
Directed by DINO RISI Screenplay by RUGGERO MACCARI...