Experimental ‘Aria’ to Kick Off AFI Fest

For director Franc Roddam, “Aria” is “like a mini film festival.”

He had two things in mind: First, “Aria” is a compilation of 10 short films set to operatic arias by 10 directors.

It also kicks off the AFI Film Festival, in collaboration with the UK/LA Festival, on Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Cineplex Odeon Plaza Cinemas.

As part of a festival featuring new films by directors who have often marched to their own, distinctly different drummers, “Aria” seems to be in comfortable company--at least for its British producer, Don Boyd. (These directors include Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ermanno Olmi and Agnes Varda.)

“Yes,” he said in a recent interview, “the directors I approached to make this are, in their own ways, somewhat renegade in the film world. I think it has something to do with my personality. I like people who stretch stories and are prepared to take risks.”

The directors of “Aria” include Roddam, Nicolas Roeg, Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Godard, Ken Russell, Julien Temple, Bruce Beresford, Derek Jarman, Bill Bryden and Charles Sturridge.

“For people who have problems with the movie, fine,” Roddam said. “I’m the one to blame.”

“Aria” was cheered in the theater but jeered in the press at its 1987 Cannes festival premiere. In London, said director Temple, “let’s say it got extreme reactions.” Elle magazine dubbed it “the hottest date movie of the year.” American critics have so far tended toward the view of Luc Sante in Premiere magazine: “ ‘Aria’ appears to be an achievement not of the film maker’s art but of the packager’s . . . the sort of thing you’d expect to see at a world’s fair.”

If Boyd is stung by the comments so far, he tries not to show it, insisting that the movie “overall has had mixed notices.”

“There is this sudden adjustment you have to make from segment to segment, and I think that’s why it’s been difficult to take for some people,” Boyd said. “It’s attacked on one hand by opera purists who don’t like their opera tampered with, and on the other hand by film critics not used to the film’s unusual structure. Everyone says it’s irreverent and anti-opera, but it’s not particularly. There’s a deep respect for the original work in each segment.”

In managing the activities of 10 sometimes strong-minded film makers, Boyd said with a characteristic touch of irony, “I gave them complete freedom--plus three guidelines. They could select any aria, as long as it was in the RCA catalogue (part of the deal that Boyd made with the label, which in turn provided financing). I asked them not to re-create a scene from the opera as it would be staged and spelled out in the libretto. And each film had a $75,000 budget.” The film’s total budget was $1.8 million.

Giuseppe Verdi is the most represented composer in “Aria,” with three segments: Roeg’s depiction of the attempted assassination of King Zog of Albania (played in drag by Theresa Russell) set to various arias from “Un Ballo in Maschera”; Sturridge’s black-and-white film of London kids based on “La Vergine degli Angeli” from “La Forza del Destino” and Temple’s sex comedy, with Buck Henry and Beverly D’Angelo unknowingly cheating on each other at the Madonna Inn, set to several arias from “Rigoletto.”

Some segments dipped into the obscure end of the RCA catalogue. Beresford staged “Marietta’s Song” from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and Godard matched a montage of various arias from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s “Armide” with moments in a day at a Paris body building gym. Altman depicted an 18th-Century audience of lunatic asylum inmates, free for the day, watching scenes from Jean-Phillippe Rameau’s “Les Boreades,” while Jarman chose “Depuis le jour” from Gustave Charpentier’s “Louise.”

Ken Russell combined “Nessun dorma” from Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot” with the dreams of a car crash victim; Bryden directed John Hurt in the film’s scenes that link each segment (“Vesta la giubba” from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci”) and Roddam used the “Liebestod” from Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” for a night of deadly love in Las Vegas.

In separate interviews, Roddam and Temple both agreed the low budget allowed for more freedom of invention.

“That’s why, all of us jumped at the chance to film something we deeply felt,” said Roddam, director of “Quadrophenia,” “The Lords of Discipline” and the upcoming “War Party.” “You lack creative freedom with big budgets.”

Roddam’s segment stars Bridget Fonda (Peter’s daughter) and painter and non-actor James Mathers (who currently has a show at a La Brea Avenue gallery) as an erotic couple with a death pact. Roddam said he wanted to find something to match the more than 5-minute ascent of romantic passion in “Liebestod,” so he framed the action around a torrid lovemaking scene that, he admitted, was a radical one for the young Fonda to have as her movie debut.

(It isn’t “Aria’s” only erotic moment, and, according to Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, the film’s distributor, the sexual content compelled the company to remove the MPAA’s R rating from print ads and replace them with the stricter “No one under 17 will be admitted.” Miramax’s policy, Weinstein said, is not to print the MPAA rating on ads for “art house films with sexual content. The movie’s been compared to ‘Fantasia,’ and we didn’t want parents to take their children to it.”)

Temple decided on a light touch for his sex tale, saying that he wanted to see how much fun it would be to compose a film out of a dozen tracking shots (one of which he had to cut for time considerations), mostly at the grandiose Madonna Inn. “It’s the ideal American spot: bizarre, exotic, repellent,” said the maker of “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle,” which starred the Sex Pistols, plus several pop music-based films, from “Absolute Beginners” to a Janet Jackson video (“When I Think of You”).

“I wouldn’t claim to be a great expert on opera,” he said, “but I read somewhere that I claimed not to be a fan of the music. That’s ridiculous. Opera was the pop music of its time. The upper class took it away, and it should be brought back to the people. I thought the best way to do that would be to make an irreverent tale to counter the reverence attached to opera.”