MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘The Brothers Mozart’ Dissects Creative Process

There’s no question that those who know opera, “Don Giovanni” in particular, can more fully savor the ironies and outrages of Suzanne Osten’s “The Brothers Mozart” (at the Nuart, Saturday through Tuesday) than the rest of us, yet its delicious humor can be enjoyed by everyone. That’s because the serious underlying question that this Swedish film raises with such crackling wit and zest applies to the classic works in theater as well as opera: How do you make Shakespeare--or Mozart--come alive and still be true to his spirit?

In regard to staging Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” the film’s mercurial hero, Walter (Etienne Glaser), has drastic answers. “I hate opera!” he announces to his assembled cast. For starters he’s going to set the action in a cemetery. His singers, well prepared and confident to the point of smugness, are shocked, but their reaction is nothing compared to that of the members of the orchestra, whom he wants to take part in the opera’s wedding procession and to wear clown costumes as well. (“I hear he made the orchestra perform in the nude in Oslo,” whispers one indignant musician to another.)

“The Brothers Mozart” is about how Walter attempts to bully, cajole and even appeal to sweet reason to get everyone involved (including the stagehands) to go along with him. In doing so he reveals the very nature of creativity, which means that he can be alternately--and simultaneously--brilliant and cavalier.

The most important point in this actually quite modest little movie is to suggest that to create art, especially that of a boldly innovative nature, is to risk the pretentious. If “The Brothers Mozart” accomplished nothing else it would be invaluable for suggesting so persuasively that there are greater artistic sins than pretentiousness--e.g., the boredom that comes from a lifeless, hidebound adherence to tradition. We’re left to consider, furthermore, that pretentiousness, like it or not, is sometimes inextricable from the truly avant-garde.

Occasionally, “The Brothers Mozart” (Times-rated Mature) strains too hard for its laughs and is a bit long-winded for a comedy, but on the whole it’s scintillating and original. Its most awkward aspect is its title, which is a belabored and not really appropriate reference to the Marx Brothers and their trashing of “Il Trovatore” in “A Night at the Opera.” Incidentally, the delightful Glaser, who was Osten’s principal collaborator on the script, has in fact staged “Don Giovanni” in a graveyard. Surely, Mozart would have been amused.