MOVIE REVIEWS: BLISS, BOREDOM AND BANALITY : Zeffirelli Mutilates Verdi’s ‘Otello’ in Loose Translation

The ads for Franco Zeffirelli’s portentous and pretentious “Otello” film, which opens today amid considerable brouhaha at the Plitt Century Plaza, are emblazoned with two names in big type.

The first belongs to the tenor and would-be matinee idol Placido Domingo, who portrays the tragic Moor of Venice. The second belongs, of course, to the superstar director.

If one searches the ads with a magnifying glass, one can find a third name: Giuseppe Verdi.

The billing, though demeaning to one of the most sublime geniuses in the history of musical theater, is painfully appropriate in this instance. To say that Zeffirelli has taken liberties with the score would be akin to saying Nero took liberties with Rome.

In the brutal name of cinematic exigency, Zeffirelli has cut more than 30 minutes of music. Gone is Desdemona’s Willow Song. Gone is the “Fuoco di gioia” chorus. Gone, unforgivably, are the crucial final measures of Iago’s narration of Cassio’s dream, “Era la notte.” Gone is half of the mighty Vengeance Duet, along with a bleeding chunk of the great concertato in the third act.

Under the circumstances, one cannot even call this two-hour perversion “Highlights From ‘Otello’.” It is bad enough that the omnipotent director removed whole set pieces. It is worse that he destroyed structural logic as well as musical continuity with careless internal snippets. There ought to be a society for the prevention of cruelty to dead composers.

Zeffirelli doesn’t even trust Verdi enough to let the music that remains speak for itself. Take the beginning: Although the composer created what may be the most graphic, most violent, most chilling storm music ever written, the movie reduces it to a little pitter-patter on the sound track.

It serves as mere accompaniment for the opening credits and, more disturbing, as distant counterpoint for a sonic onslaught of lightning thumps and thunderclaps and verbal expletives and sudden splashes and ominous crackles and droning rain-gurgles.

The indignities, unfortunately, do not end with mutilation. Zeffirelli dares stop the action to interpolate vulgar, stylistically jolting dance sequences. At the end of the opera, when there must be shattered silence, he gets all mushy and reprises the love music.

And so it goes. The singing is overamplified not just beyond the realms of reason and realism. It is miked up beyond the pain threshold, and mucked up too.

This, after all, is an “Otello” replete with calliopes masquerading as voices, an “Otello” adorned with artsy echo effects and obtrusive sound effects. At the benefit premiere screening on Wednesday, it also was an “Otello” besmirched with low-fidelity stereophonic hisses and rumbles.

Zeffirelli might argue that all these laments are irrelevant. “Cinema is its own art,” he has said in an official apologia. “I only did to Verdi what Verdi did to Shakespeare.”

The gentleman doesn’t shrink from placing himself in lofty company.

One might want to forgive the musical losses of the film if only it offered tremendous dramatic gains. But it doesn’t.

Zeffirelli has concocted a vastly overblown, overdecorated travelogue that lovingly examines vistas of a 12th-Century castle in Barletta, Southern Italy, and a Venetian fortress and arsenal in Crete. The images are beautiful. The colors, courtesy of Cinecitta, are lush. The camera work of Ennio Guarnieri is self-conscious and nervous, nervous, nervous.

The action, by the same token, tends to be more concerned with effect than affect.

That the characters happen to sing--often with inept lip-synchronization--rather than speak is treated as a mere convention. No attempt is made to bridge realism and stylization. Zeffirelli is too busy keeping things moving, too busy bombarding the surface senses, too busy embellishing the plot.

Sometimes, he actually second-guesses both Verdi and Shakespeare. This Otello, for instance, isn’t content just to strangle his innocent bride and stab himself. In what should be high drama but comes perilously close to unintentional humor, he also harpoons the evil Iago.

Given all the distractions and distortions, it is difficult to concentrate on the principals.

When he is allowed to dominate the screen, the smearily black-faced Domingo glowers, pops his eyes and stalks the boards earnestly while emitting mighty noises.

Katia Ricciarelli, his Desdemona, is properly pale, demure--and wispy-toned.

Justino Diaz makes Iago all the more sinister by playing him young, bluff and innocent. Despite what seems like vocal anti-type casting, the basso sounds compelling in the baritone tessitura.

Cassio, who gets to enact a nearly nude scene in the dream sequence, is outfitted with the handsome face and beefcake form of Urbano Barberini, plus the nondescript voice of one Ezio di Cesare. The supporting cast of thousands is unfailingly picturesque.

The music, according to the credits, was “produced and conducted” by Lorin Maazel. Only God and the Cannon Group can possibly know what produced means in this bizarre context.

Those responsible for the release of the film, incidentally, did not want it reviewed by music critics. One can see why.