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Tosca
review by Gregory Avery, 20 September 2002 One good test as to whether a
performance of an opera is working or not is whether, during the
emotional high points, the music and drama succeed in inducing
goosebumps, and that happened at least twice during Benoît
Jacquot's film of the Puccini opera Tosca (which won the Prix
Louis Delluc, one of France's highest film awards, last December).
Jacquot's
film starts out by introducing the main characters -- the
artist Mario, his lover, the singer Tosca, and Scarpia, the
malevolent secret police official -- by showing (using high-contrast
black-and-white) the singers who will be portraying them recording
their parts in the studio, accompanied by the Royal Opera House
Orchestra of Covent Garden (stirringly lead by Antonio Pappano,
whose conducting in these parts of the film is sometimes poetic in
its own right). The film then switches to color to show the
characters and action unfolding in period costuming and sets. There
is method in this: it eliminates our noticing that the performers
are acting before the cameras to prerecorded music by directing our
attention to it at the beginning, then dismissing it. (Joseph
Losey's visually stunning 1979 film of Mozart's "Don
Giovanni" was nonetheless emotionally distant, in part because
you were aware that the performers were trying not to look as if
they were lip-synching their parts.) The sets for the action have an
artfully half-constructed look to them, set against a slate-black
cast of darkness -- what we might imagine in our heads were we
listening to a recording of the opera at home.
The very beautiful Angela Gheorghiu,
as Tosca, and Roberto Alagna, as Mario, suggest a loving, gentle,
impassioned relationship -- he'll end up being captured, detained,
and tortured by Scarpia, and Tosca will end up taking a knife to
Scarpia because of it, delivering the "kiss of Tosca" in
the meantime. (The depiction of their love also helps gets us
through the rather tricky plot devices that arise in the opera's
third act -- reminiscent of Victorine Sardou, who wrote the stage
melodrama the opera's based on, and his deathless advice as to how
to handle stage dramaturgy, "Torture the women! Make them
suffer!") Ruggero Raimondi played the Don in Losey's 1979 film,
but Losey used Raimondi's looks to emphasize his crepuscular regard
for the Don in particular and the opera in general. As Scarpia,
Raimondi makes a simply splendid villain -- he brings great shading
and nuance to a part that most would be content to giving a
standard, mustache-twirling interpretation to. Raimondi's Scarpia is
even a little taken-aback by the breath of Tosca's emotion when she
expresses jealousy in
response to the suggestion of the possibility of Mario seeing
another woman -- Scarpia knew he had it in her, and he wanted to tap
into that to trick both Mario and Tosca to his ends, but he's still
surprised over how much feeling, and passion, she has, and that, in
turn, makes him want to have her for his own all the more so, and it
will further drive him towards destroying a love that, we know, to
be a true and genuine one between Mario and Tosca.
It is both a musical and dramatic
piece that utilizes big emotions and requires a staging that will
allow them room to build and flow. Jacquot seems to have kicked-out
the walls of this Tosca so as to accommodate an infinite
amount of space, whether it be intimate or grand, in the making of
this picture. And, along with a remarkable use of color -- there are
swirls of reds and golds that are, at times, breathtaking -- the
film in turn blooms with a beautiful and powerful surge.
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