‘Klinghoffer’ resonates anew

The screening of a brilliant, morally courageous and overwhelmingly moving filmed version of John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” on Sunday and Monday at the San Francisco International Film Festival once more gives this work about terrorism an eerie timeliness.

It received its premiere 12 years ago in Brussels under tight security just weeks after the end of the Gulf War. This week, American soldiers in Baghdad captured Abul Abbas, the Palestinian Liberation Front leader who masterminded the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking. During the takeover of that Italian cruise ship, American tourist Leon Klinghoffer was murdered and his body thrown overboard in his wheelchair.

Controversial from the start, “The Death of Klinghoffer” angered some audiences and critics by allowing Palestinian terrorists to express their concerns poetically on the lyric stage and by appropriating the plight of a private family. On the other side, there were those who were disturbed by Adams’ heroic depiction of Klinghoffer and called the work a Zionist plot. Los Angeles Opera, a co-commissioner, refused to mount it in the early 1990s. More recently, the Boston Symphony canceled performances of the “Klinghoffer” choruses in the wake of Sept. 11.

But as the work’s topic and themes get more pressing, and as Adams -- this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for music -- gets more celebrated, this opera refuses to go away. And the emotionally draining new film, which British director Penny Woolcock shot last year on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean off the coast of Egypt, will surely give it new life. It is the first real masterpiece of cinematic opera.

The film takes a radically different approach from the opera’s original staging. Then, the director, Peter Sellars, who had the original idea for “Klinghoffer,” the librettist Alice Goodman and Adams took great pains to be evenhanded. Sellars’ staging was so abstract that the work felt more like a religious pageant than a contemporary drama. Even so, the anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist labels stuck.

Woolcock’s naturalistic film presents a vivid, realistic enactment of the hijacking, fleshing out characters with back stories and inventing new mute roles that add useful historical context. Yet she remains true to the score, which is incisively conducted by Adams.

But most important, Woolcock found an excellent cast of opera singers who prove inspired screen actors, able to withstand the physical scrutiny of her edgy, unflinching hand-held camera. She zooms up uncomfortably close to them, in preparation for Adams’ unflinching music, which takes us, even more uncomfortably, inside them.

The film opens without song. Marilyn Klinghoffer spits in the faces of the four terrorists standing in an Italian police lineup. Her face registers a wife’s contempt for her husband’s murderers; their faces, a study in sorrowful defiance. Terrible history has led to terrible deeds. There is no forgiveness.

The opera’s first music comes in powerful choruses of exiled Palestinians and exiled Jews that define the passions of Arabs and Jews for the same land. Here Woolcock shows a Palestinian family savagely displaced from its house by Jewish settlers; the new occupants, Holocaust survivors, hungrily tear at each other in ferocious lovemaking as Adams’ choral writing swells to merciless climaxes. Terrorists and some passengers on the Achille Lauro are the children of 1948.

As Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer, Sanford Sylvan, who created the role in the original production, and Yvonne Howard give stellar dramatic performances.

On stage, Klinghoffer’s death was presented in the stylized form of an oratorio. Time stops, and he sings an unearthly slow melody as his body slowly falls into the ocean. A dancer drags a body in a sheet across the stage. Woolcock, however, dares us to confront the dead man as he sinks underwater, bullet hole in his head, while Sylvan, on the soundtrack, sings with transcendental lyricism. Howard is unforgettable at the end: As Marilyn learns of her husband’s death, grief and anger gradually consume her.

One of the boldest aspects of the opera, and the one that gave its detractors ammunition, was its nuanced view of motives. The libretto never excuses the terrorists, but it does represent them as men who believe in a cause. Woolcock goes further, vividly exploring the terrorists’ dreams and the roots of their unquenchable anger, a parallel to the profound anger of Israelis forever haunted by Holocaust memories.

War attracts poets and sadists, and the Achille Lauro hijackers are no exception. Egyptian baritone Kamel Boutros is mesmerizing as Mamoud, the most sensitive of the terrorists, a singer of rhapsodic songs about birds and the sea, but still a warrior with a short fuse. English baritone Leigh Melrose is positively terrifying as the vicious Rambo who callously torments the passengers. Omar, who has the strongest sense of being on a holy mission, is a pants role for a mezzo-soprano. Woolcock uses a male actor (Emil Marwa) with a mezzo (Susan Bickley) voice-over, which gives Omar a startlingly otherworldly quality. Tenor Tom Randle is the trigger-happy Molqui.

Superb British baritone Christopher Maltman provides yet another disturbingly memorable performance as the ship’s captain who fashions himself a peacemaker only to be cruelly betrayed by the terrorists.

Smaller roles for other passengers, a Swiss grandmother, an Austrian woman and a British dancing girl -- all sung by the same singer in the opera -- are here distinct and hence much more troubling characters.

Woolcock’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” was shown at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, but attracted little attention and no American distribution. The work was made for British television, and it will air in the U.K. next month on Channel 4, a commercial station that produced the film. But in the U.S., the only scheduled screenings so far are at the San Francisco Film Festival and at Lincoln Center, where it will be shown May 13 as part of a John Adams festival.

Others should follow. An agonizing witness to our time, this “Death of Klinghoffer” demands to be seen.

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‘The Death of Klinghoffer’

Where: San Francisco International Film Festival

When: Sunday, 5:30 p.m., Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St., San Francisco; Monday, 7 p.m., Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Ave., Berkeley

Price: $8.50-$10

Contact: (925) 275-9490

Running Time: 120 minutes

Sanford Sylvan...Leon ...Klinghoffer

Christopher Maltman...Captain

Yvonne Howard...Marilyn ...Klinghoffer

Tom Randle...Molqui

Kamel Boutros...Mamoud

Leigh Melrose...Rambo

Emil Marwa (voiced by Susan Bickley)...Omar

Directed by Penny Woolcock. Composed by John Adams. Libretto by Alice Goodman. London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by John Adams.