MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Venus’ Focuses on Backstage Intrigue

“Meeting Venus,” directed by Istvan Szabo, tries to be about so many brain-numbingly weighty issues that it ends up a big blur of Great Ideas. It gets this season’s Ingmar Bergman award for deep-dish philosophizing, though it’s noisier and messier than most of Bergman’s cinematic cogitations.

It’s about the relationship between art and life, between sex and creativity, East and West, capitalism and communism, male and female, order and chaos. The staging of Wagner’s “Tannhauser” in a Paris opera house with an international cast serves as the pretext for a lot of high-toned, low-down dalliance. Everybody’s emotions are at fever pitch and everybody has a healthy pair of lungs--particularly offstage. (The film, rated PG-13, opens today at the AMC Century 14.)

Glenn Close plays a famous Swedish diva, Karin Anderson, who is notorious for entangling her conductors in webs of intrigue. The “Tannhauser” conductor, Zoltan Szanto (Niels Arestrup), is on the verge of broad recognition; the Paris production will be broadcast internationally by satellite.

His problems begin when he arrives in Paris: He’s frisked by police--it must be that glowering artist’s look of his. Rehearsals are constantly interrupted by the squabbling of unions and management, the production is picketed by an environmental group because its sponsor is apparently destroying the Brazilian rain forest, Zoltan’s paycheck is not forthcoming and, when Karin finally arrives on the scene, she snubs him because of a careless remark he made about her that was once reported in the press. When he tries to patch things up, she responds by saying, “Music should be rehearsed, not talked about over coffee.”

It turns out that Karin’s huffy imperiousness is a smoke screen; she’s the diva as softie. No Wagnerian antler headgear for her; her bright, shining helmet of bleached-blond hair may give her the look of a sci-fi empress but she’s in her own moony, romantic orbit. Her real life passions are all-of-a-piece with her operatic art.

Zoltan, though he’s married and pursued by several other women in the troupe, is no match for Karin’s melting moods. For a while it’s funny trying to figure out what her real agenda is. Is she a species of Svengali, perhaps? Does she need this conquest to perform onstage at her peak?

These questions arise because, taken strictly on its own heavy-breathing merits, the romance between Karin and Zoltan is a fizzle. Close has the right haughty tenderness for the part, and she manages long-lingering stares without blinking; there’s a sphinx-like glamour to her. But there’s also a sensual component that’s missing here, and Arestrup doesn’t compensate for the lack. He’s a bit of a lump. With his flyaway hair and bantamweight frame, he cuts a herky-jerky pose on the podium, but there’s no pep to his show-offiness. His soulful agonies look like they could be cured with a dose of Pepto Bismol.

Szabo, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Hirst, throws in a few plot resemblances to the actual “Tannhauser,” including a baffling moment in this otherwise realistic film when Zoltan’s baton sprouts shoots. In the filmmakers’ defense, the opera’s plot is so convoluted that to build more plot parallels into the movie would have been madness. But the movie is a little bit mad anyway; that’s its saving grace. (The “Tannhauser” staging, for example, is in the nouveau S&M; mode.)

The voice dubbing, particularly in the music rehearsals, gives the entire production a creepy, disembodied effect: When Close bares her tonsils and Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice comes out, it’s difficult to appreciate its beauty because it doesn’t match up with Close. She’s demonized by the dubbing.

Does Szabo have a feeling for this music? The film draws on his own experiences directing “Tannhauser” on stage, but he seems more keyed into the backstage intrigues than to Wagner. Considering how highfalutin this film pretends to be, Szabo plays up some fairly crude, crowd-pleasing attitudes, like the way he shows some of the supporting singers being so turned on by their vocal gymnastics that they can’t keep their hands off each other. We’re supposed to regard this opera company as a microcosm of the human comedy, but nobody seems quite human, and the comedy is strictly burlesque.

‘Meeting Venus’

Glenn Close: Karin Anderson

Niels Arestrup: Zoltan Szanto

Erland Josephson: Jorge Picabia

Johanna Ter Steege: Monique Angelo

A Warner Bros. release of an Enigma production. Director Istvan Szabo. Producer David Puttnam. Screenplay by Istvan Szabo and Michael Hirst. Cinematographer Lajos Koltai. Editor Jim Clark. Costumes Catherine Leterrier. Production design Attila Kovacs. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13.