A Screen ‘Don Giovanni’ With a Hint of Marx

Making a film of an opera, as opposed to recording an opera production on film, is a notoriously difficult art. Only a handful of directors have managed to escape the tyranny of an invisible stage proscenium on screen. Peter Brook abandoned the conventions of stage-bound opera with his slender “Carmen.” Franco Zefirelli’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” took flight with a freshness of approach that his lavish opera house productions often lack.One near perfect amalgamation of opera and the screen is Joseph Losey’s “Don Giovanni,” which, thanks to a recent restoration by Gaumont, is being revived tonight at the Museum of Modern Art. Upon its release in 1979, opera critics carped that too many liberties had been taken with Mozart’s masterpiece and that the singers were uneven.But there can be no doubting Losey’s clarity of vision. It was his first and only venture into opera and, though he claimed filming “Don Giovanni” to be a longstanding ambition, he had never seen it performed in an opera house. The film was suggested by Paris Opera and brought together young singers who were to leave a lasting mark on the opera repertory, among them the New Zealander Kiri Te Kanawa.But it was the sublime Italian settings — including the spectacular Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda in Vicenza (purists moaned that the Don was Spanish) — beautifully photographed by Angelo Filippini, along with Losey’s dark treatment of the ambiguous storyline, by Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, that ensured the film’s success. Never an easy opera to mount, not least because of the cumbersome stage effects needed to have the statue of the Don’s murder victim come alive, Losey combines the lightness of the serial seducer’s art with a fierce condemnation of the lover turned rapist.The film sits uneasily in the Losey canon. Born in La Crosse, Wis., and enduring a mostly undistinguished Hollywood apprenticeship, he was about to direct “High Noon” when in 1951 he chose exile rather than face the House Un-American Activities Committee. Notwithstanding commercial junk, like the spy spoof “Modesty Blaise,” and the fact that working in Europe under a succession of pseudonyms offered him attractive tax breaks, Losey always claimed to stay true to his self-confessed “romantic Marxism,” born of his response to the mass unemployment of the 1930s.And while in “Don Giovanni” Losey unashamedly celebrates the visual splendor of Renaissance Italy and basks in the glorious voices provided by Paris Opera, Losey still sneaks in some Marxist polemic.Losey had worked in Moscow with Sergei Eisenstein, who mounted such heroic if historically inaccurate re-stagings of the Bolshevik Revolution as “Battleship Potemkin” and “October.” Then in the ‘60s, Losey collaborated with Harold Pinter on masterpieces of observation on the fecklessness of the English bourgeoisie, “The Servant,” “Accident,” and “The Go-Between.” In 1972, despite the appearance of Richard Burton, then at the height of his powers, Losey made a singularly wooden and unconvincing account of “The Assassination of Leon Trostky.”But most significant in understanding his idiosyncratic take on “Don Giovanni” was his collaboration with Bertholt Brecht. In America in 1947, Losey had staged the premiere of “Galileo,” which encouraged comparison between the heavy-handed treatment of ideological dissenters in the 20th century with the authoritarian denial of free thinking imposed by the Vatican upon the founder of modern astronomy. Like Brecht, in “Don Giovanni” Losey surreptitiously imposes a 20th-century Marxist sensibility upon a period — Don Juan’s early 17th-century Seville — which, though riven by class, was entirely feudal.Losey, however, felt that a conventional Marxist battle between factory owner and the exploited must be portrayed as the overarching motivation of the piece. Ingeniously, he introduced a glassblowing works, a rare industrial process of the period, in which the Don meets his dreadful fate by being consumed by the furnace.No matter. Losey’s primitive ideology barely impinges upon the action, which trips along on Mozart’s effervescent score. And the scene in which the Don’s paid accomplice Leporello lists the old lecher’s endless amorous conquests as master and servant skip down the steps of the Villa Rotonda is magical.Screening tonight at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Museum of Modern Art ( 11 W. 53 St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).

A Screen ‘Don Giovanni’ With a Hint of Marx

A Screen ‘Don Giovanni’ With a Hint of Marx

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