Will they boo Terry Gilliam at La Scala?

Last week, Terry Gilliam announced he‘s to direct opera at Milan‘s La Scala. Last year, Michael Haneke shocked Paris with his ’Don Giovanni‘. And Julien Temple‘s off to Australia to film an opera. Why are cinema and opera such good bedfellows?

'A sell-out in both senses' Anthony Minghella's 'Madame Butterfly' (© Johan Persson)

Two movies hint at the ebullient brio (critical jargon for ‘camp’) that links film and opera. The opera house sequence in ‘Citizen Kane’ shows the wretched Mrs Kane, bullied into singing by her husband, surrounded by dressers, wigmakers, singing coaches and stage hands in the frantic bustle just before curtain rise on opera at its most opulently unreal. And in Zeffirelli’s ‘Callas Forever’, based on the director’s attempts to lure the singer out of her reclusiveness, Fanny Ardant’s Maria Callas walks through Paris with Jeremy Irons’ impresario while passers-by start and gasp, the way people do when seeing an opera singer in the street.

At first glance inimical – the cinema naturalistic, opera ludicrously artificial – they’re actually complementary. Fluidity, flexibility, the ability to ignore limitations of place and time, to speed, slow down or freeze the moment, to split the screen or give many characters their voice simultaneously: cinema and opera have more in common than either has with the constricting straight theatre.

Straightforwardly filmed opera can be successful. Bergman’s enchanting ‘Magic Flute’ acknowledges the stage framework of Stockholm’s baroque Drottningholm theatre; the aesthetic values of Zeffirelli’s ‘Traviata’ effortlessly sell you menthol-tipped or Ferrero Rocher. Joseph Losey’s conservative formula – great cast, nice setting – ensures that ‘Carmen’ and ‘Don Giovanni’ are solidly entertaining. But directors moving between film and lyric stage face pitfalls.

The recent include Michael Haneke, who directed ‘Don Giovanni’ in Paris last year. Julien Temple is filming ‘The Ghost Wife’ in Australia. Terry Gilliam is at La Scala for Giordano’s rip-roaring slice of verismo, ‘Andrea Chénier’. Temple’s task is relatively easy, a modern work, by Jonathan Mills. Temple need only rein in the boisterousness of ‘The Filth and the Fury’ for this intimate, atmospheric piece.

Different problems face Gilliam at La Scala. ‘Chénier’ is a conventional stand-and-bawl 1896 melodrama where lung-power disguises mediocre music. Italians know what they like in these horsehair-stuffed antiques: celebs who line up and hit the high notes. Gilliam’s brilliant visual sense and designs by Dante Ferretti (‘Baron Munchausen’, ‘The Aviator’) may be wasted on such tosh. One hopes Gilliam won’t be reduced to brandishing his buttocks contemptuously at the booers as happened with Ken Russell’s Vienna ‘Faust’. Revealing ‘most operas bore me and my six children’, Russell once ended an updated ‘Madame Butterfly’ with the atom bomb on Nagasaki. Anthony Minghella’s ‘Butterfly’ for ENO and the New York Met goes all out for Japonaiserie, swamping the music with visual gimmickry, dazzling colour, marionettes manipulated by visible on-stage puppeteers – this trade fair sponsored by Japanese Heritage was a talking-point on two continents and a sell-out in both senses.

But Michael Haneke’s reported success with ‘Giovanni’ is unsurprising: nefarious doings among high-flying execs and office cleaners in a skyscraper, phallic emblem of a thrusting society. Haneke’s films beautifully exemplify the tension between extravagant plot and taut form, controlled style expressing the unthinkable. Very classical, very Mozart.

Of all music theatre’s newcomers, Haneke’s grasped the essence of staging opera: far from providing directorial carte blanche, this bizarre, OTT form imposes inescapable discipline. Mood, emotion, pacing – they’re all rigidly set out in the music, word by word, note by note. The soundtrack is the star, and even the most brilliant director has to serve it.

Terry Gilliam’s staging of ‘Andrea Chénier’ opens at La Scala in July 2008.

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