MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Aria’: Off-Key Variations on Opera Hits

The early promotion for “Aria”--Don Boyd’s dizzy extravaganza, which opened the AFI Fest on Thursday and begins runs today at the Fine Arts in Beverly Hills and the AMC Main Place in Santa Ana--blared something about “a quantum leap in the art of music on film.”

The ads didn’t specify whether the leap in question was forward or backward.

More recent blurbs tried for a sexier image: “The most sensual experience you’ll have in a movie theater.”

The film may indeed be that for some. Most viewers, however, will find that fondling a perspiring cup of soda in the dark is a more sensual experience. More rewarding, too.

The premise behind this presumably high-minded exercise is simple, and simple-minded:

Take 10 adventurous directors. Let each one choose a famous opera aria, to be culled from the aging RCA catalogue. Ask each to film the thing without the constraint of direct reference to the actual text and/or inherent dramatic context.

Disney did something like that with “the classics” in “Fantasia,” remember? He used the music essentially as wallpaper to decorate some not-so-free associating. At least Disney didn’t have to work against the words. He didn’t have to ignore any librettos.

The idea of reducing opera’s Greatest Hits (plus a few esoteric excursions) to MTV pap is a dubious proposition virtually by definition. Verdi, Wagner and Puccini didn’t write abstract tone poems. They labored mightily to convey specific emotions for specific characters in specific situations. To ignore all that in the quest of unfettered visual interpretation is to court disaster.

Still, the result might at least be a fascinating disaster if the director somehow could manage to illuminate the core of the musical pulse. If. . . .

The directors at work here blithely ignore that pulse. Suffering apparent delusions of grandeur, they seem all too eager to swap the lofty for the trivial.

Bill Bryden frames the proceedings with an excruciatingly banal lost-love and found-death episode that culminates in John Hurt mouthing the words of Caruso’s “Vesti la giubba.”

Nicolas Roeg, having heard that Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera” concerns a political assassination, splices unrelated excerpts from the tragic opera onto the sound track while he unravels a comic melodrama about the historic would-be assassination of King Zog of Albania. The role ends up as a preposterous vehicle for Roeg’s wife, Theresa Russell, in mustachioed drag. The music, alas, isn’t funny.

Charles Sturridge rapes the poignant convent scene of “La Forza del Destino” for a sleazy little black-and-white should-be shocker about hoodlums stealing and crashing a car in the slums of North London. Don’t ask for a musical motive.

Jean-Luc Godard decides that the poignant classic splendors of Gluck’s “Armide” translate best as a contest between some beefcake athletes working out in a gym and some overheated but under-dressed women trying in vain to distract the body-builders. So much for Gallic poise.

Julien Temple at least aims for comic foreplay-relief. Using a “Rigoletto” potpourri, he stalks Buck Henry and a gaggle of raunchy cretins in one long shot through the Byzantine mazes of the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo. Madonna may be mobile , but the wit here isn’t.

And so it goes. Bruce Beresford, particularly unimaginative, reduces Marietta’s Lied from “Die Tote Stadt” to a maudlin valentine in which the cardboard lovers actually do some strenuous singing. Robert Altman uses an elegant, archaic extract from Rameau’s “Les Boreades” as an excuse for clumsy Hogarthian pictorialism replete with hints of the Marquis de Sade.

Franc Roddam cheapens the ethereal myth and mystery of Wagner’s “Liebestod” with a sordid mini-melodrama depicting teen-age sex and suicide in Las Vegas. A particularly unsavory Ken Russell illustrates “Nessun dorma” with a surrealist ritual in which exotic-kitsch priestesses are adorned with jewels that eventually turn into bloody wounds. We didn’t know that Puccini had written science fiction-nightmare music.

Finally, Derek Jarman takes a silly sentimental journey with Louise’s “Depuis le jour,” casting Charpentier’s youthful protagonist as an ancient diva who enjoys fatal flashbacks on the occasion of her final bow.

The sights, throughout the film, stubbornly contradict the sounds. The fusions of stilted scenario and borrowed aria invariably veer toward the pretty, the pretentious and the ponderous. There is no genuine cinematic expansion of the musical impulse here. Nor is there any really genial counterpoint.

As responses to serious examples of operatic art, the vignettes range from the naive to the insensitive to the insulting. The cumulative drama is, at best, incoherent. Some achievements simply resist easy popularization and fast predigestion.

The sound track, virtually a Leontyne Price festival, is, as always, much too loud for either vocal realism or aural comfort.

Disclaimer: After the official press screening, “Aria” reportedly underwent some editing revisions. A public relations spokesman described the changes as “not extensive.” The final version was unavailable for review before the opening.

‘ARIA’

A Miramax release of a Lightyear Entertainment/Virgin Vision production. Executive producer Jim Mervis, Lightyear Entertainment, Tom Kuhn, Charles Mitchell. Producer Don Boyd. Directors Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, Bill Bryden, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Franc Roddam, Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Charles Sturridge, Julian Temple. With Theresa Russell, Buck Henry, Beverly D’Angelo, John Hurt, Anita Morris, Bridget Fonda.

Running time: 90 minutes.

MPAA-rating: R (The producers have said that due to the explicit nature of the film, no one under 17 will be admitted.)