Kon Ichikawa | Otōto (Her Brother) 1960

a kind of nun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aya Koda and Yōko Mizuki (screenplay), Kon Ichikawa (director) Otōto (Her Brother) 1960

 

Most people in Gen’s situation—with a penurious father (Masayuki Mori) who spends most of his life separated from the other family members as he writes hidden away in his home office, a rheumatoid mother-in-law (Kinuyo Tanaka) who does little housekeeping, yet has plenty of time to gossip each day with her fellow religiously-inclined friend, and a younger brother,  Hekiro (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) who shoplifts before going on the racking up debts in the local billiard hall and riding a horse to its death—would have left this dysfunctional family at the very first opportunity. Instead, Gen (Keiko Kishi), a beautiful high-school student, is forced to return home each day to clean house and cook meals, and spends the rest of her little free time caring for her almost criminal brother, paying off his debts and attempting to parent him in the absence of any help from her father, who dotes on his son, and the ineffectually complaining mother. Throughout the film she is forced to travel from police station, to gambling halls, to a horse rental service, testifying to her brother’s best intentions while he mostly teases and mocks her devotion.

      Gen must even fend off the attentions of a parole officer who uses Hekiro’s bad-boy behavior as a way to attempt to seduce the young woman. The only man who shows her any real signs of love, a poor local factory workman, is scared off by Hekiro and his gang.

      In Her Brother the great Japanese director, Kon Ichikawa, is not so much interested in the “story” of this family’s life as he is in studying their dynamics, where, in the patriarchal system of the day, everything centers around the youngest boy’s well-being and his father’s solitude.

 

    Ichikawa’s greatest films have to do with large moral battles, and even his later domestic drama, The Makioka Sisters, is epic in the complexity of the sisters’ family life and their importance in the culture in which they live.

     Her Brother, however, is a far more tepid expression of family life, focusing, as it does, on Gen’s near-saintliness, and family healing after the young center of their attentions, Hekiro, slowly dies of tuberculosis. By the time of the boy’s death, Gen has seemingly lost her youthful beauty, having had to transform herself into the unappreciated third parent, willing even to share Hekiro’s dishware which might likely lead to her own infection with TB.

     Yes, Ichikawa’s beautifully filmed work, subtly expresses the difficulties of being a woman in this period of Japanese society, but Gen is hardly represented as a model of any rebellion against that world. And, finally, we can only suggest that in her meek obedience she has brought the tragedy of her life upon herself.

 

    Only in a few instances do we see that she has a spark of self-recognition that might carry her away from the smothering world in which she lives: a moment when she triumphantly hits the  billiard balls, blushes at the attentions of the young factory worker, or rails against Hekiro’s lecherous parole officer.

      Most of the time, however, like the last hours of Hekiro’s life in which she ties a ribbon between his arm and hers so that he might awaken her to “celebrate” for one last time, she willingly ties herself to his life. If we are saddened by this would-be juvenile delinquent’s death, we also celebrate it, while doubting that Gen will ever be able to discover a more fruitful way of living. As her religiously obsessed mother-in-law might have wished, she has already become a kind of nun.

      It is hard to imagine why this film was remade in 2010 by Yoji Yamada, even though it was seen as a celebration of Ichikawa himself.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017).

        

 

 

Paul Preston | Now You Know / 2017

a father comes out to his son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Preston (screenwriter and director) Now You Know / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

10-year-old Oliver (Jayden Louth) is getting the opportunity to spend the weekend with his rapper Dad (Jurrell Carter) during a new filming session. The boy asks his father if he can be in on the shoot, but his father promises him “next” time. Yet Oliver is puzzled by the fact that the cameraman Luke’s daughter Scarlet is performing in the musician’s song.

       Obviously, the divorce between Oliver’s mother and his father has been fairly recent, and he’s hasn’t been told any of the reasons. And it appears the precocious boy is a bit shy around the new people with whom he is expected to share his father. Luke’s daughter, Scarlet, moreover, seems to be slightly sulking and not at all that friendly.

     Given this film is only 12-minutes long, what Oliver rather quickly begins to perceive—and the viewer along with him—is that the relationship between his father and the cameraman is a bit more intense than he might have imagined. Rising up from a later afternoon nap, the boy peeks out the window to see his father at the dinner table kissing Luke.

      Later, he reports this to Scarlet, who does not at all seem surprised, although she’s never actually seen her father and Oliver’s kiss. The quick-thinking boy immediately confronts his father: “Dad, are you gay?” A question which those of my generation would surely not have known how to even ask of their fathers.

      That question results in an intense background argument between the two men, with the rapper making it quite clear that he’s not at all ready to explain the situation to his son. Luke scoops up his daughter and they leave in anger, clearly in disagreement with his lover’s inability to explain the situation to his son.

       The two, father and son, are left in the darkening trailer in almost a face-off, the father refusing to explain his consternation. On his hand computer the boy watches a scene from another video of the two men together who look very much in love and happy, and suddenly the entire situation becomes quite apparent. The child grabs the cellphone and runs from the trailer, calling up Luke and Scarlet before handing the phone back to his father.

      Obviously, he has forced his father to ask Luke and his daughter to return. Meanwhile, Oliver explains to the elder that he’s still his Dad and he continues to love him, what can only be described a reversal of the usual coming out situation. The two hug, just as Luke returns, a man who Oliver now accepts into his life, as Oliver’s father hugs his lover. Apparently both the kids are now in the video.

      British filmmaker’s Paul Preston short nicely hints at what is likely the positive shifts to LGBTQ acceptance between the younger and older generations. But it might have been more fascinating and complex as a short feature, in which we watch the boy come to the discover over a longer period of time, presenting his confusions, his fears, and misapprehensions before the sudden revelation. Children often perceive things quite quickly and are far more accepting to change, in many cases, than their parents. But the discovery of his father’s radical shift in sexuality in what appears to be a single day condensed into 12 minutes is simply too much to be believed. And this film leaves us wanting to know more. How long his Oliver’s father known he was gay? How did his wife discover it? How is she dealing with that revelation? And will this radical discovery affect the relationship between mother and son?

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2024 | reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

Sidney M. Goldin and Ivan Abramson | Ost und West (East and West) (aka Good Luck) / 1923

the boxer becomes a married lady

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney M. Goldin and Eugen Preiß (screenplay), Sidney M. Goldin and Ivan Abramson (directors) Ost und West (East and West) (aka Good Luck) / 1923

 

This silent Austrian classic which appeared originally in Yiddish and German, according to The Women’s Jewish Center is the oldest surviving Yiddish film.

     The work centers around the return of Morris Brownstein (Sidney M. Goldin), known in the New World as Brown, and his daughter Mollie (Molly Picon) from their home in the US to the father’s native Galicia* to attend a family wedding.

     For most of the film, the young American female Mollie behaves like a roughhousing tomboy, causing havoc among the Galician family and the local yeshiva boys equally. On the holy Day of Atonement, where the family fasts while spending the entire day in the synagogue, Mollie, who has grown terribly hungry, sneaks out of the services, returns home, and eats almost the entire chicken and other ingredients that her uncle’s cook as pre-prepared for the evening’s breaking of the fast. Having left the others nothing to eat, she is severely spanked by her indulgent father.

     But before she’s even recovered from those pains in the ass, she is ready to box in the ears of the servants who reported her as the culprit. Mollie is a big fan of boxing and has brought along her own gloves.

      At an early pre-wedding celebration, the rabbi arrives with several yeshiva boys. Her father begs Mollie, as she proceeds into the room where the boys have gathered, don’t play rough, “these are nice boys” he pleads, knowing that she could easily out wrestle and corrupt the innocent students. But before any of the adults know what’s happened, Mollie has jumped upon a table top to teach the yeshiva boys, the cook, and the cook’s boyfriend how to dance Western style. Again she is spanked by a father who has evidently no success in controlling his spoiled American daughter.

      In another incident, Mollie is nowhere to be found, and the adults look everywhere in an attempt to stop whatever antics she may be up to. She is discovered dressed as a yeshiva boy, singing and drinking as one of their kind. 

      What no one realizes, meanwhile, is that the jeshiva bucher boy, Jacob (Jacob Kalich), a rabbinic student who lives in the house and, as a “freeloader” is maltreated by the cook and butler, has fallen in love with wild American Mollie.

 

      When Mollie sees the bride-to-be dressed in a trial run in her wedding dress, she begs to borrow the veil, pretending to be a bride herself. Everyone goes along with the idea, quickly creating a huppah and scooping up Jacob from the kitchen to participate in the mock wedding ceremony with Mollie as the imaginary bride. They go through the basic elements of the ceremony, ending with a ring which the bride-to-be loans her, the cook, the butler, and others egging Jacob on to put the ring on her finger. The yeshiva boys, however, try to warn him, but eventually after holding back for several moments, he drops the ring upon her finger.

      When the rabbi and adults finally appear, they are horrified by the fake ceremony, not just because of the mockery of a holy rite, but because by Jewish law once a man puts a ring on the finger of a young woman he is legally married to her.

     At this very moment, the film turns from a comic work centered upon the attempts of a wild Westerner to defy the fustian traditions and values of the East, to a far more serious exploration of the consequences of that attitude.

       Mollie and her father are horrified by the realization that she is now married to a traditional student of the Torah. The wild Western woman cannot imagine her life as a traditional Jewish bride. The rabbi insists that Jacob renounce his marriage so that they can divorce. But strangely, without giving his reasons, he defies the rabbi.

       Because he has gone against the authorities, Jacob is ousted from his school and sent away from the Galician Brownstein household. Living for a while with a loving, poverty-stricken couple, Jacob eventually takes up the offer of his wealthy Viennese uncle to come live with him, announcing to Mollie and her father that, if after five years she still does not wish to live with him, he will grant her a divorce.

       The Browns, Mollie and her father, are forced accordingly to travel throughout Europe, the father hoping to keep his daughter’s mind from the dreadful reality that she may be facing. After a continental tour, in which Brown is absent from his business responsibilities, they arrive in Vienna.

       Jacob, meanwhile, entering the city as an outsider himself, and being mocked for his traditional Talmudist garb, gradually becomes assimilated, like his uncle, into Viennese society just as had so very many thousands of others during the very same years. But Jacob is, after all, a truly brilliant young man and eventually becomes a noted writer under the name of Ben Ali.

      Hearing that his wife and her father are now in Vienna, he arranges that his uncle invite them to his reading at the Oriental Society, which at the same event awards Ben Ali an honorary membership.

     Taken with the now quite handsome man whom she vaguely recognizes as being familiar, Mollie quickly becomes one of his fans. And meeting him for dinner at his uncle’s house and other activities, she begins to fall in love with Ben Ali.

    The five years are now about to pass, the uncle and his wife inviting the Browns to a special breakfast. Suddenly, Jacob appears in his Talmudic garb saying that he will gladly divorce Mollie is she desires. 

     She is about to claim that right and sign the contract, but the boy suddenly pulls off his costume revealing that he is now Ben Ali, she finally coming to the realization that she is already married to the man who she truly loves.

       The first long portion of this film clearly reveals Picon’s character as a dangerous outsider, perhaps even a young woman with more masculine behavior than female traits. And in some respects, this work is even more rowdy and truly sexually transgressive than her later Yiddle with a Fiddle (1936), where she is dressed for most of the film in male drag. Here she appears in drag only for a few moments, but her behavior throughout serves basically as a mockery of the paternal and male-centered Yiddish and Jewish traditions, something almost unthinkable in 1923. It is only when she is accidentally married and comes to be controlled by circumstances, turning from a tomboy in a mature woman that redeems her behavior and likely permitted her audiences to perceive her previous behavior as simply an example of childlike Western mischief. 

      But in a sense, both Mollie in Galicia and Jacob in Vienna share a deep kinship in being outsiders in worlds they inherently disrespect. In both instances, Picon’s and Kalich’s characters come to terms with those new worlds in which they have relocated by assimilating and learning to respect values and individuals different from their own selves.

     The film, accordingly, becomes almost a primer for both the new and old worlds to find a way to marry and embrace both the laws and traditions of the past and the rapidly changing and ultimately totally altering world of the present. Like the works of Sholem Aleichem such as Tevye and His Daughters (טבֿיה דער מילכיקער, the source of Fiddler of the Roof) which appeared in 1894, one might argue that Ost und West served an important educational role for Jewish assimilation while the later Yiddle and His Fiddle worked more as a nostalgic view of what was already nearly lost and would fully disappear in only a few years.

 

*Considered the poorest region of the former Austria-Hungarian empire, Galicia was located between Poland and Hungary, with its major city being Lviv; it is now part of both Ukraine and Poland.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

 

George Clooney | Good Night, and Good Luck / 2005

applause, applause

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Clooney and Grant Heslov (screenwriters), George Clooney (director), Good Night, and Good Luck / 2005

 

Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s and Grant Heslov’s movie about Edward R. Murrow, is the kind of film that audiences always applaud. My companion, Howard, attended the movie twice before I took in a showing on a weekday afternoon, and at each performance, we concurred, the audience so responded.

      Certainly the focus of this film—Edward R. Murrow’s head-on attack of then-Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Senate Committee for UnAmerican Activities, an act of great bravery on Murrow’s and CBS’s part—is worthy of audience appreciation. Murrow’s reporting, his incisive appeal to his viewers that Americans ought to be able to encounter ideas that threatened their system without censorship or arrest, and his outright disdain for McCarthy’s methods of innuendo and lies is well documented and in this film is represented through a noir-like dramatization of real events interspersed with actual television and film footage of the period. The world McCarthy and his committee had created is brilliantly presented by Clooney and cinematographer Robert Elswit in cinematic terms through extensive use of rack-focus camera shots and a blurring of the background in many scenes, along with jumpy, held-hand camera effects that recreate the sense of early television and suggest the psychological condition of people involved in a time when it was sometimes difficult to clearly see the broader picture of world politics and where even the tiniest of questionable political behavior might jeopardize one’s career. W. H. Auden and others described the period as “The Age of Anxiety”;  certainly it was a time when one nervous to do anything out of the ordinary—all of which Clooney and Heslov reiterate through several dramatic episodes, particularly in scenes revealing the hidden marriage of Joe and Shirley Wershba (played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) [studio executives did not permit employees to be married] and the continual need for self-evaluation of personal sympathies or even relationships with those who might have had Communist connections [CBS news announcer Don Hollenbeck (played by Ray Wise) is attacked by newspaper columnists for having “pinko” associations, a slur which brings on his suicide; and, when Murrow (brilliantly played by David Strathairn) and Fred Friendly (played by Clooney himself) demand their staff tell them of any possible communist connections, one staff member suggests he should leave the team for having previously been married to a woman who had attended Communist Party meetings before he met her]. In short, it was a time of deep paranoia that affected everyone.

 

    On that fateful night in 1954, Murrow’s “See It Now” broadcast crowned a series of events that would lead to the downfall of McCarthy and his years of destructive effects on the American psyche, effects that still have consequence in today’s battles between the political left and far right. But if Murrow won the proverbial battle, he lost the “war,” so to speak. A short year after that brave journalistic act (the movie unfortunately portrays it coming almost immediately after the McCarthy broadcast) CBS and its head William Paley (played here by Frank Langella) cancelled this regular news program, moving its diminished series of five shows to Sunday nights. And it is this fact that, it seems to me, is really the issue of this motion picture. Clooney and Heslov document the McCarthy attack effectively, but they have another, perhaps more far-reaching theme to present: the general decline of American journalism, and the rise of MTV-entertainment television and newspaper coverage. The movie begins and ends a few years after Murrow’s famed show with a lecture he made to the American press about the ever-increasing lack of serious news coverage.

     Accordingly, Clooney’s film, although presented as a kind of realist drama, is more than that. It is a film of political commentary that continues to have important significance today. It is unfortunate that the film only suggests these issues—albeit quite forcibly. When one thinks about the declining coverage of serious events on US television, where local news stations now spend most of their time—at least in my city of Los Angeles—on car chases and disasters; when one perceives that even the half-hour of national news coverage reveals little about major international events; when one recognizes that journalists today often do not seem interested in pressing for the truth behind political statements and presidential edicts that are often promoted by implanted journalists, or that when they do question the issues, like Judith Miller, they connive and fabricate the truth; when one understands that most book sections across the country have been severely limited or suspended, or that as with the New York Times Book Review and The Los Angeles Times Book Review the book review editors have chosen, when it comes to literature, to refocus their attentions on more popular genres and best-selling publications; when one puts all of this and more into the context of Murrow’s impassioned plea for more serious and complex reporting, one is perhaps made “nervous” again.

    Do we as a populace know now when we’re being lied to? Do we even recognize today that our news is incomplete—or worse—simply nonexistent? I am always depressed when I return home to my family in Iowa, where in the thin pages of the Cedar Rapids Gazette—just as in most smaller cities—the entire news coverage is presented in brief Associated Press notices? Yet my mother is convinced that she knows everything that’s happening of importance in the world; “I keep up with the news,” she proudly says.

      Finally, it comes down to a societal and institutional disdain for Americans themselves, a feeling by a few who believe they hold knowledge (and often have no better grasp of it than anyone else) that the general populace cannot and will not assimilate complex information. A few years ago I had lunch with then-editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review Sonja Bolle. When asked what books I was soon to publish on my Sun & Moon Press label, I replied that we had just published a translation by the French Oulipo writer, Raymond Queneau. “O, I love Queneau,” she gushed, much to my surprise. “He’s a wonderful writer. But, of course, we couldn’t possibly do a review of his work!” “Why not?” I naively responded. “Oh, our readers couldn’t understand a review about his literature. You know, most newspaper readers read at the sixth grade level.”

     I was appalled, not so much by the journalistic cliché we have all heard many times, but by the absolute misunderstanding, it seemed to me then and does yet today, of who her audience was. “Do you think,” I asked, “that it is the least literate part of your audience who reads the book section? Why even have a book section if that’s the case?” Inwardly I continued my argument: “We live in a very diverse time where readers seek out many different subjects and issues. And furthermore, I don’t believe that any reader of a newspaper is a complete idiot. Don’t you owe readers something more than your disdain?” I would have been talking to the wall.

     Accordingly, I wonder, when those many audiences applaud Clooney’s excellent film, just what it is that they are applauding: Murrow’s bravery for attacking a bigot? Murrow’s advocacy of a more serious journalism? Clooney’s presentation of these issues? Or perhaps it is for all these reasons and more. I would like to think that in applauding Good Night, and Good Luck these audiences are simply asking to be treated as Murrow treated his, as intelligent adults.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2005

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 1 (January-February 2006)

 

 

Wojciech Voytek Olchowski | Presilenie (Solstice) / 2016

without friends

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wojciech Voytek Olchowski (screenplay and director) Presilenie (Solstice) / 2016

 

Polish director Wojciech Voytek Olschowski’s Solstice is like an outline for a film about gay teen love without hardly any character development or events. A young man attending the summer solstice festival listens to part of a rock concert before heading off. Before he can leave the park, another young teen stops him and suggests they sit and talk for a short while. The two Mateusz Zieleźnik and Krzysiek Kuśmierz begin an awkward conversation toward what any LGBTQ+ individual would recognize as the beginnings of a gay relationship, starting with a discussion of being alone, attending the event without any friends.

 

     Their introduction to one another is almost immediately interrupted by the appearance of what appears to be his own brother, who we soon after discover is mentally challenged. The bother (or another friend) immediately asks him “Who is this boy?” a question, in either case, that is a true challenge in Poland, where increasingly gays have been feeling threatened and challenged.

      In any event, the young teen immediately gets up and leaves.

      The next day, we briefly meet his father (there appears to be no mother) and his brother, as well as his grandmother with who he meets for a short chat. She discusses the problems that her grandson given his school responsibilities and evidently the care of his brother, and attempts to encourage him to find his own life and fulfillment away from the family.

      The following day he again meets up with the new friend, apologizing for his behavior and explaining that he feels stupid for his behavior. His new friend challenges him wondering it their relationship might still be a problem, and the film ends with the young teen admitting that he doesn’t know, it could be or might not. In short, we see no resolution, no further discussion of their possible relationship, and have no way of knowing whether a real relationship has even begun.

      Given the current gay scene in Poland, perhaps this is the best a young director such as Olchowski and do: simply shrug his shoulders and hope that the two teens might find a way to get to know one another. But as a film, it establishes no territory in which we feel as viewers that we might enter into even imagining what such a narrative might actually entail. Sadly, the “solstice” which is represented by the image of a fern, a sign, so the director tells us, of love and adventure, is itself something almost to be denied. For gays in today’s Poland, celebration of any sort seems something to be approached carefully, even as this young teen has done, an event to be denied: “You know, probably it is not my style.”

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2024 | reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).

Barbara Willis Sweete and Francesca Zambello | Les troyens / 2013 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-Live Production]

delusion and desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hector Berlioz (libretto, after Vergil’s Aeneid, and music), Francesca Zambello (stage director), Barbara Willis Sweete (film director) Les troyens / 2013 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-Live Production]

 

As scholars and critics have long pointed out, Hector Berlioz’s Les troyens—although written as a single long work (the performance I saw yesterday ran for about 5 ½ hours)—is really two different operas in one. In fact, Berlioz never saw a production of the entire work as he had conceived it during his lifetime, since the companies of the day felt that they were not up to producing the whole, and demanded it be broken into two parts: La prise de Troie and Les troyens à Carthage. The first part languished in obscurity until 1957 when London’s Convent Garden produced the first full-length production of the work.

       Certainly, what I witnessed, the first Metropolitan opera production of this work in ten years, felt like it broke into two, perhaps even three parts. The first is a far darker and less exploratory work, which, however, through the powerful soprano performance of Deborah Voight as Cassandra and the baritone voiced Dwayne Croft, as her lover, Coroebus, had many powerful moments. Cassandra, the daughter of Priam, is in the strange position of being ostracized by her own people for her dire predictions, and possibly even losing the love of Coroebus. Much of those two acts are spent on just those dark premonitions, which arouse powerful emotions, despite the fact that one wonders, at times, if she can see into the future, why Cassandra maintains her position that Coroebus should flee; surely his fate is written that he will die in Troy. Perhaps that is why, ultimately, she agrees to remain in the city and marry him, despite her belief it will end in their death.

     One of the loveliest moments of this first part is the sad arrival of Andromache, Hector’s wife, now a widow. The chorus, which is much at the center of La prise de Troie, mourns Hector’s murder with her and her son Astyanax, along with King Priam and Queen Hecuba—this solemn occasion interrupted by news of the priest Laocoön’s and his two sons’ deaths for desecrating the Greek gift to the Trojans of the great wooden horse.

      Inexplicably, the Trojans, despite Cassandra’s pleas, suddenly appear determined to bring the horse into their city, offering it up as an offering to Athena, an act powerfully visualized on the Metropolitan stage as the horse is pulled into view, assuring Troy’s destruction.

      One of the most disturbing scenes of all opera occurs in the last few moments of the first part of Berlioz’s work, as the majority of the Trojan woman, hearing of the loss of their city and observing the burning castle and other major buildings, determine to kill themselves en masse, which, as the Greek soldiers appear, they proceed to do, dropping to the floor one by one. If there was ever a symbol of the end of any culture, it is this Jonestown-like suicide.

     Indeed, much of the work, its constant focus on war and the hatred the Trojan warriors breed wherever they go, seems very contemporary, given just such events in the mid-East today. But, Berlioz almost lulls us into the dream of a paradisiacal peace with the long two acts that follow wherein the Trojans come upon the pacific Carthaginians, ruled by the beautiful Dido (Susan Graham). I am not sure that I completely responded to the white-clothed Carthage population, which looked more like a Mormon gathering than a North African community, but I suppose the reference was to a sort caftan-clothed community such as Morocco might be seen today. As opposed to Troy, whose populace have suffered years and years of violence, the Carthage population—who themselves have had to escape their home city of Tyre—seem to be a far-more enlightened people, celebrating their own creativity in ships and buildings and in toiling the soil. The queen, in fact, sits upon a throne seemingly tracking and glorifying the architecture of Carthage itself, as she and others add, throughout the early scenes, new constructions to this pop-up map. Yet, that set also somewhat irritated me, simply in its placement of her throne upon the very homes and buildings in which the people lived.

    And although Dido seems wise and bountiful, she herself seems to have grave doubts about the future. Despite the fact that her sister assures her she will again find love, Dido resists the thought, insisting the she remain focused on her duties, for which is described as delusional—just as Cassandra had previously described for her visionary warnings.

     The moment Aeneas (Bryan Hymel, who bravely and quite capably replaced, at the last moment, Marcello Giordani, who had been almost cruelly reviewed for his singing of the same role) arrives, war again appears on the horizon, this time in the form of Carthage’s neighboring Numidians. Having been awarded by Dido free entry to her city, Aeneas, upon hearing of the approaching warriors, offers his own soldiers up as partners with the poorly armed Carthaginians, assuring them victory against Iarbas and his warriors.

 

    The rest of this two act section, is spent in dances—not always brilliantly performed in Sunday’s high definition broadcast, perhaps not so believably choreographed, and far too long, as much as I enjoy the French opera tradition of including ballet—is followed by several lovely ballads, particularly Iopas’ (Eric Cutler) pastoral song, O blonde Cérès—both dance singing in honor of the intense love that has arisen between Aeneas and Dido. Only the queen’s advisor Narbal (Kwangchul Youn) seems to proffer any dramatic intensity as he, like Cassandra earlier, foretells the end of his city through Dido’s romance.

     So beautiful is Dido’s and Aeneas’ rhapsodic duet to their love (O nuit d’irvesse), however, that one wants to believe in Anna’s (the excellent Karen Cargill) belief that the future can bring nothing but joy.

     Just beneath the surface are Aeneas’ own songs of the Trojan history—in which he recounts that after the destruction of Troy, Andromache, instead of killing herself, has married Pyrrhus, one of the murderers of her former husband Hector—wherein we are reminded of these wandering Trojan’s damnable fate. At the moment of their greatest bliss, predictably, Aeneas is visited by the ghosts of Hector, Coroebus, and Cassandra, reminding him that his destiny lies not in Carthage but in Italia.

      Beginning with a beautiful ballad, Vallon sonore, sung by homesick sailor, the Trojan sailors are quickly awakened to that destiny once more, as Aeneas, escaping the arms of his beloved queen, determines to set sail. Dido’s appearance temporarily weakens him, but as the ghosts of his own past appear once again, he attempts to explain to her that he must abandon their love in order to obey his gods.

     The opera from thereon belongs to Dido as, in her fury, she calls down fates upon the Trojan survivors, demanding a pyre of all Trojan presents and her gifts to them be constructed, upon which she, like the Trojan women of the first part, stabs herself to death. The pacific and loving people she has ruled suddenly become, like the Trojans before them, a warlike nation determined upon revenge, sensing, perhaps, their own destruction by the future Romans.

      So ends Berlioz’ opera, in an unredeemable hate that fully links it’s ending to its disparate beginning, while reminding us that anger always breeds anger, war can result it nothing but further destruction.

     Watching Les troyens is, at times, an exciting and stimulating experience. Yet I can’t say it was entirely fulfilling. I suspect our seemingly accidental choice of German bratwurst and potato salad for dinner that evening might have subconsciously suggested that we might have preferred—despite my usual preference for anything French—to have sat through, for a similar length of time, Wagner’s tale of a similarly destroyed culture—also with Deborah Voight—Götterdämmerung.

         

Los Angeles, January 6, 2013

Reprinted from American Theatre, Opera, and Performance (January 2013).