Gary Halverson and Phelim McDermott | Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts / 2023 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

send in the clowns

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel, Richard Ridell, and Jerome Robbins (libretto), Philip Glass (music), Phelim McDermott (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts / 2023 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

I reviewed the original production of the 2016 opera when it was performed by LAOpera, but saw it again in the 2023 HD-Live MET production with most of the same cast members and the same stage director. Accordingly, I chose not to create a new review, since I feel that what I expressed 7 years previously was still appropriate, although I must admit that seeing it live on the screen does wonderfully overwhelm one with its images, and actually does permit and even justify some of the more spectacle-oriented scenes. Screen and the very large MET stage, quite obviously, admits to stop-motion tableaux vivant artistry much better than does the smaller dimensions of a theater production.

      Yet, for me, it’s admittedly hard to know quite what I feel about Philip Glass’s operas, particularly the three signature works, Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagrapha (1980), and Akhnaten (1984), all three of which, after re-visiting the MET production company’s production of the last of Glass' epic works.

      Surely they are all beautiful pageants, with the chordal collection of the composer’s repeated and shifting motifs often creating sounds of shimmering perfection. In all three productions, the sets and costumes were innovative and, in Akhnaten, quite stupendous in their effects. In all the productions I’ve seen, the singers and other figures were superior. Particularly in Akhnaten, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges sang quite brilliantly, with the Metropolitan Chorus performing at the highest level (despite the unfortunate collapse, in an early scene of the opera, of a chorus member, which required several of her fellow singers to help her off; we can only pray that she was not seriously hurt.).

      Conductor Karen Kamensek and the supreme MET orchestra came through excellently.

    And yet…in all three works, two of them sung in ancient languages, and the earlier work often singing the language of counting, my I both felt a kind of ennui as the singers moved through space in snail-pace deliberateness, shifting from opera’s more-standard narrative sweep to an opera made up of images closer to tableaux vivants than to normative theater.

      I feel strange to appear to be expressing dissatisfaction with that fact, since I have long expressed my love of just such a narrative technique in the works of Djuna Barnes and in the filmmaking of Sergei Paradjanov, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others. Perhaps it’s just not as effective on stage, particularly when accounting a rather exciting tale such as the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaten’s fascinatingly short life. In fiction you can combine, as does Barnes, the “stops” in the fiction with a strong narrative overlay, using the temporary tableaux as evidence for the effects of the story. In film, directors such as Paradjanov link their tableaux vivants into a series of narrative events. But in theater such as this, in which there is no true narrative structure, the time-stopped scenes become mere spectacle.

      While Einstein featured the abstract, the mathematical and scientific theories of the thinker, and Satyagrapha dealt with the sometimes equally abstract world of politics, Akhnaten’s is a world of religion, and a radical new religion to boot.*

     Perhaps it is appropriate, at least in the early and late scenes, to bathe the new pharaoh’s, and, later, dead pharaoh’s, experiences in the slow and measured pace of rituals, letting the driving music, most excitingly presented in tympani and brass (there are no violins in this darker-sounding work) create the inner narrative energy. This Egypt is still a dark place of priests who worship dozens of deities, all of whom must be given their due before the new King can be crowned. And it is not accidental that for the first 20 minutes of this opera, the work’s hero is entirely speechless, often while nude—in short, vulnerable and even unprepared for his soon-to-be glorious clothing. Indeed, this King remains partially naked, and therefore, an easy target throughout much of his life.

     It is also clear that the drop-dead love duet between Akhnaten and his wife Nefertiti might not allow for more action than the two walking slowly across stage, each swathed in an endless train of red robes that become intertwined. After all, Tristan and Isolde often stand—at least in most productions—in near motionless scenes to sing their great love duets.

        I can even understand why Akhnaten’s great hymn to the sun, a lovely, quiet piece which Costanzo sings in the very front of the stage—again, while appearing naked, with a gossamer robe to which are appliquéd breasts and, now, a vagina where his real penis once was located—does not require nor even want much movement. Here, perhaps for the first time in opera we encounter the first truly transgender figure.

    Yet even later events when Akhnaten sings, quite agitatedly about his vision of a new city to celebrate his sun god, or, when he and his family are coming under attack from the Egyptian citizenry for his insistence on a near-monotheistic worship (scholars now argue, that, at least in the early years, Akhanaten’s world was much more open for individuals to maintain some of their older beliefs), or when the Pharaoh actually comes under attack, being killed in front of his wife, mother, and six daughters do we really need the same slow pace?

       To somewhat entertain us, director Phelim McDermott sends in the clowns—in this case a team of British jugglers who throw balls and other objects, mostly circular—paralleling, of course, the father and mother sun from which Akhnaten argues he has emanated. Yet even their actions are often slowed down as they are forced to slowly crawl across the stage floor and move gradually in and out of the singers. And when they do suddenly spring into action, quite adeptly tossing their balls and clubs through the air, they appear as more of a distraction than an integral element of Glass’s work.

      Strangely, while Glass’s score hardly even lets up in its driving momentum, the fact that he generally prefers to skip stage action or slow it down to such a gradual motion that it appears they are moving in a kind of dream space, he also enervates his characters to such a degree that they appear, themselves, to be unreadable hieroglyphs, and become difficult to comprehend in real life.

        Akhnaten and his world, indeed, are difficult for our time to comprehend, since most of his city, art, and communications were destroyed by his son Tutankhamun and the later pharaoh Horemhab. But it would have been nice, just once, to see these figures behave like real human beings instead of historical ghosts. And, despite the long length of this opera, I’d have given up the jugglers any day just to hear another, more revealing aria by Akhnaten and Nefertti.

 

*I should add that, although the opera seems to give tribute to Akhnaten for his attempt to change his country from polytheism to monotheism, and Freud, in his important study From Moses to Monotheism attempts to connect those changes with Akhnaten’s rule with Moses’ demand that the Hebrews give up their other gods, I am, personally speaking, not so sure I mightn’t prefer the early Egyptian and later Greek and Roman polytheism, which I recount in several of the essays of My Year. These people, at least, lived with a far larger ability to assimilate different religious views. As we know, monotheism most always tended to want to destroy all other religious viewpoints, a history of religious monotheism which remains with us even today, and helped to give rise to groups such as ISIS and even the American Klu Klux Klan.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2023

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2023).

Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern | Saint Amour (Holy Love) / 2016

variations of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern (screenwriters and director) Saint Amour (Holy Love) / 2016

 

After posting my essay on their early 2004 film Aaltra, I discovered several of other cinematic works by the duo of filmmakers Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine including their truly revelatory and humanly touching film of 2016, Saint Amour. I found this film so openly forgiving of the everyday failures of our species that I could imagine few other comparisons outside of the works of their fellow countrymen, also writing in French, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. Along with equally compassionate filmmakers such as the French-speaking and Dutch directors Jacques Feyder, Chantal Akerman, Jaco Van Dormael, and Lukas Dont one has to wonder at the fact of this small endlessly war-ridden country’s ability to produce such absolving if rather pessimistic visions of mankind.

      The central figures of Saint Amour are anything but saints and certainly not representatives of lovers, the “hick” peasant farmers Jean (Gérard Depardieu) and his son Bruno (Benoît Poelvoorde) who travel to Paris for the annual agricultural fair with their prize bull and other cows.

      In the past Bruno (Poelvoorde substituting in the usual pairing of Kervern and Delépine) has escaped to Paris for the same event with his uncle (Gustave Kervern) who use the occasion to visit the numerous booths of the various French winemakers to imagine a visit through the various wine-making provinces of France. Consuming glass after glass as they move along the booths, the two seldom have been able to complete their “travels’” through the French “provinces” before they fall drunkenly on the floor or, in this year’s case, join the piglets in a pen which after attempting to capture them, fall into a deep stupor.

      Bruno’s father has accompanied his son this event knowing that Bruno has once again come up against the fact that he is frustrated in his role as a farmer who never has the opportunity to truly walk through the doors of French exhibition halls into the streets of a city notorious filled with the opportunities of love and other forbidden activities.

      As Bruno tearfully and painfully admits to his truly understanding pater, he has become an unattractive farmer hick without any possibility of attracting other women in his vastly delimited life. Alternatively, he imagines himself as becoming what we recognize would perhaps be even more limiting, a life where he might work as a salesman. When you perceive yourself at the bottom of the cultural totem pole, even the standard roles of cultural enslavement sound attractive.

      Commuting with his dead wife through a cellphone message taped from the day of her death, Jean explains his plans to accompany his son on an actually tour of the wine-making provinces to help provide his errant “boy” to live out some of his dreams, hopefully allowing him to return ever-after to the farmer fold.

     In what quickly becomes another Delépine and Kervern “on the road” movie, Mike, following the advice of Jean’s and Bruno’s tourist maps, rides with them through the various wine-making provinces, himself messaging back through his cellphone with his wife and children, as he moves them through the landscape, taking detours to meet up with his own previous sexual dalliances, one of who has now become a disabled wheelchair victim and another who, now pregnant literally attacks her former “lover.”

      But Jean, alas, is himself a kind of idiot, hiring a taxi driven by an equally confused driver, with the very un-French name of Mike (Vincent Lacoste) (which is suggests sounds more like John Deere, the noted US factory that produces their tractors and other farming equipment), to take off a couple of days to tour them through the French countryside.

     In what quickly becomes another Delépine and Kervern “on the road” movie, Mike, following the advice of Jean’s and Bruno’s tourist maps, rides with them through the various wine-making provinces, himself messaging back through his cellphone with his wife and children, as he moves them through the landscape, taking detours to meet up with his own previous sexual dalliances, one of who has now become a disabled wheelchair victim and another who, now pregnant literally attacks her former “lover.”

     Along the way, Jean, who has not had sex or has partaken of alcohol since the death of his wife (in the former case) or the birth of his son (in the latter), finds himself as the confident of one young waitress with whom they meet up, and with whom Bruno might have himself imagined joining in bed, and, in another instance, sharing a bed with a same-age woman with whom he shares a remarkable night, but with whom he “forgets” to have sex.

     Mike, presumably the sexual sophisticate of the group, later reveals, after Jean admits that his telephonic messages are spoken to a dead woman who is still the receptor his messages, that his own cellphone communications are to a nonexistent wife and a family he has simply created in order to deflect any questions about his love life.

     As the trio moves through space, their sexual failures become more and more evident, at one point Bruno having sex with a real-estate agent only to discover that the tryst was merely a set-up by the agent (Ovidie) to restore her relationship with her lesbian partner. At another point, hooking up with several prostitutes, Bruno admits to one of them that he is truly bi-sexual as he discovers himself the next morning in drag, wearing the prostitute’s dress.

      Mike, who quickly escapes all of his past liaisons, is forced one night to endlessly listen to the prophet-like drivel by the owner of a guest house (played by the highly controversial writer Michel Houllebecq), and later admits at his own failure with women due to his early childhood disease of penile Phlebitis, medicines for which turned the tip of his cock black.

      These failed men, their masculinity totally threatened, are redeemed into heterosexual paradise by the appearance of a figure named—what else, Venus (Céline Sallette), an amazon-like horsewoman who is determined in the last remnants of her menstruation cycle to produce a baby, and seeks out sex with all three men in order to assure herself of impregnation.

      One by one, each of these “sexual incompetents” are supposedly brought to sexual rhapsody by engaging in sex with Venus, the three of them finally embracing her as their mutual wife in their imaginary shared fatherhood with the woman, the three of them becoming, without the movie actually admitting it, a kind of polyamorous trio who bring her home of the countryside life of a farmer’s wife.

      Although heterosexual normativity is obviously the result of their ambivalent sexual explorations, Delépine and Kervern do not necessarily focus on its delimitations. Indeed, their film seems to suggest, if only through Mike’s sexual fears, Jean’s sexual abandonment, and Bruno’s utter sexual confusion, that these men are able to discover themselves as fully functioning sexual beings. Who is the father, i.e. who might have been potent enough to finally produce the sperm that creates Venus’s child, is beside the question. They now love one another just as much as they love Venus. Besides, we must remember, Venus bore not only the Roman warrior Aeneus, but fathered Cupid, the endless procreator of love itself.

 

Los Angeles, October 3, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).