Spanish director Carlos Saura’s musical melodrama about the creation of the opera Don Giovanni is beautifully shot, handsomely dressed and capably acted, with one notable exception, none of which can disguise its fatal flaw: it’s mind-numbingly dull.
One wonders why Saura and his co-writers Raffaello Uboldi and Alessandro Vallini were attracted to the story of Lorenzo Da Ponte, who wrote the famous opera’s libretto in a sometimes fractious collaboration with the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
True, Da Ponte was a disgraced priest from Venice, a former Jew who was exiled for licentious behaviour (ie, unrestrained womanizing), belonging to a Masonic society and publishing texts attacking the Church and the Inquisition. But he gets far more screen time than the far more interesting Mozart, and the plodding narrative lacks the dramatic power and raw passion of the music.
Da Ponte (Lorenzo Balducci) seeks refuge in Vienna while remaining under the spell of his mentor, the legendary libertine Giacomo Casanova (Tobias Moretti, in an unsubtle caricature). He’s introduced to court composer Salieri (Ennio Fantastichini), who asks him to write the libretto for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and he takes as a mistress the diva Adriana Ferrarese (Ketevan Kemolidze), the fierce rival of Salieri’s favourite Catarina Cavalieri (Cristina Giannelli).
That’s a hit, and Casanova urges Lorenzo to work again with Mozart on a new version of Don Giovanni. During rehearsals, Lorenzo re-unites with Annetta (Emilia Verginelli), the gorgeous daughter of an old acquaintance, now Mozart’s pupil. Love blooms, so it’s arrivederci to Adriana, but their confrontation in a restaurant is poorly realized. Da Ponte’s sudden conversion from unrepentant skirt chaser to dedicated, faithful lover isn’t convincing.
Played by Lino Guanciale, this flamboyant, playful and sickly Mozart has some echoes of the character portrayed by Tom Hulce in Milos Forman’s biopic Amadeus. Mozart’s grief over the death of his father provides one of the few moments of pathos.
I, Don Giovanni may lack depth and emotion but it looks stunning thanks to ace cinematographer Vittorio Storaro in his first collaboration with the director since 1999’s Goya in Bordeaux. Among the stand-out scenes are a fog-shrouded canal in Venice along which a statue of Don Giovanni is transported, the sustained close-up of a diva in full flight, and much cavorting in a brothel.
Lovers of opera in general and of Mozart in particular will probably marvel at the musical excerpts, which are inventively staged, cleverly juxtaposing events in real life with parallel sequences from the opera.
Intriguingly, musical co-ordinator Nicola Tescari set out to reproduce as faithfully as possible the sound of the orchestra and cast at the time of the rehearsals and first performance of Don Giovanni in Prague in 1787, and she used a baroque ensemble from Prague. Annoyingly, this print has Mozart and other German-speaking characters dubbed into Italian, so the lip-synching doesn’t mesh with the dialogue.
