Italy
Nick Hasted
“Crazy? Aristocrat? Sad? Killer? Drunk?” A modern Tuscan hunting lodge’s regulars remember the myth of irascible rebel Luciano many ways, as it endures from the previous century’s misty turn. Italian-American co-directors Matteo Zoppi and Allessio Rigo de Righi’s feature debut follows documentary shorts drawn from those real hunters’ yarns, tipped now into the phantasmagoric territory of Werner Herzog, or Lucretia Martel’s Spanish colonial fever dream, Zama.We first see reflective stars sparking on Luciano’s silhouette in water, and his green eyes elsewhere seem connected to the cosmos. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ennio Morricone’s collaboration with director Giuseppe Tornatore on 1988’s Cinema Paradiso was one of the countless highlights of his career, and it’s Tornatore who has masterminded this sprawling documentary tribute to the composer, who died in July 2020.Apparently it took him five globe-trotting years to amass interviews with a huge list of Morricone’s admirers and collaborators, so perhaps it’s no great surprise that he seems to have found editing his material into a manageable shape a daunting task.Tornatore’s decision to plough doggedly through Morricone’s career, from his days as a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paul Verhoeven’s latest provocation is an old-fashioned but vigorous 17th century lesbian nun shocker, based on eye-poppingly explicit testimonies at the Christian church’s sole lesbian trial. It’s his most sustained examination of faith and sex, a theme going back to the repressive Calvinist father and sexually anarchic teens of his wild Dutch hit, Spetters (1980).Benedetta (Virginie Efira) has been imbued with a sense of religious destiny since childhood. Accepted into a Tuscan convent under stern but worldly Abbess Felicia (Charlotte Rampling), confusing, erotically charged dreams of Jesus Read more ...
David Nice
There are quite a few dull patches in the early Verdi operas that aren’t Nabucco, Ernani or Macbeth, so I wasn’t expecting so very much from the 26-year-old composer’s first shot. That was without taking into account how spiritedly the ad hoc Chelsea Opera Group Orchestra would play for conductor Matthew Scott Rogers, whizzing this shortish opera along but never breathlessly, and how well the main roles would be taken.Rogers's skill in getting his orchestra to phrase and breathe was apparent right at the start in a string arrangement of Myroslav Skoryk's bittersweet Melody, originally for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A speeding drunk driver arrows down a silent street into a Roman block of flats. The impact’s reverberations ripple through the next 10 years, in Nanni Moretti’s soulful, Italian all-star adaptation of Eshkol Nevo’s novel, Three Floors Up.The teenage driver, Andrea (Alessandro Sperduti), sent a woman fatally careening on his disastrous course, confirming the low opinion of his judge dad (Moretti), while barely phasing sympathetic mum Dora (Margherita Buy). The smashed flat’s owners, Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Sara (Elena Lietti), are more concerned by incipiently senile old neighbour Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Edmond Rostand’s familiar story of ventriloquised love becomes a sensual, sacrificial tragedy, in Joe Wright’s heady cinematic Valentine, adapted by screenwriter Erica Schmidt from her own stage musical, with music by members of The National.The setting is somewhere between the 17th and 18th century, earthy history and fairy tale. We begin in the boudoir of Roxanne (Haley Bennett), as her maid explains the female facts of life: “Children need love, adults need money.” Cash comes from the sinister Duc de Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), who sweeps her off to the theatre; en route, Wright builds a Read more ...
David Nice
Two Royal Opera staples, Verdi's La traviata and Puccini’s Tosca, now come round with too much frequency for critical coverage. It looks like Director of Opera Oliver Mears’ Rigoletto will do the same. Yet the production’s September 2021 debut was clouded by routine performances from its protagonist baritone and tenor Duke of Mantua, so a second visit was due to see if fresh casting might make a difference.It has, and very excitingly. True, we no longer have Royal Opera Music Director Antonio Pappano’s surest guidance and illumination in the pit. Stefano Montanari is in many respects Pappano’ Read more ...
David Nice
Two major composers took Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies as the subject for two very different operas. The 19 year old Rachmaninov in 1892 had inspiration but not much sense of dramatic continuity; Leoncavallo in 1912, 20 years on from his deserved smash hit Pagliacci, managed the flow but not the inspiration. Give me Rachmaninov’s memorability any day, but at least Leoncavallo’s hokum had the benefit of the best singers and conducting at Cadogan Hall last night.Quality was assured before the first note of the evening. Carlo Rizzi, here conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, stands Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2013, Gina Gershon chewed up the scenery in the daytime movie House of Versace. Focusing on the murder of Gianni Versace, it was a tacky, cheap drama that knew what it was, and was all the more entertaining for it. The same can’t be said of Ridley Scott’s new drama which focuses on an equally prestigious Italian fashion house and a murder. The film masquerades as a crime drama with an impressive gloss, but it can’t mask its daytime TV mechanics. Scott’s second film in as many months, House of Gucci follows box office failure The Last Duel. Sitting somewhere between bad opera and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
I last heard Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, published in 1610, at Garsington Opera as the summer light of the Chilterns slowly dimmed across an airy auditorium dotted with singers who bathed us in scintillating meteor-showers of sound. Laden with spectacle, surprise and virtuosity, this piece was born in splendour. Did Monteverdi, overworked in Mantua, write it specifically to secure a top appointment in Venice or Rome, or did he just want to bundle all his choral and instrumental grooves into one hulking, show-off package? Most performances tend to aim for splendour too. However Read more ...
mark.kidel
Two men trade licks: one of them delves into the heart of the blues, a potent dose of the boogie, the medicinal music of the Mississipi Delta. The other with a mournful voice and violin draws on the equally stripped-down and drone-inflected roots of Southern Italian tradition. The Italian also plays a range of frame drums with phenomenal energy and technical prowess. Mixing the rocking and rolling lilt of John Lee Lee Hooker with the frenetic pulse of pizzica music from Italy might seem an unlikely combination, but the result of collaboration based on a shared passion for the music of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One German writer found a neat yet teasing way to sum up the difference between Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first film in the Italian director’s “German trilogy”, and the two films that followed it.The Damned, known in Italian as La caduta degli dei (meaning "the twilight of the Gods"), the writer explained, is “a masterpiece which is nonetheless suitable for the cinema-goers who fell asleep during Death in Venice (1971) or Ludwig II (1973)."Visconti did, indeed, set out deliberately to surprise and to shock with The Damned, as he explains in a 1970 interview that Read more ...