Only the Mozart Is Missing

By Christopher Porterfield

DON GIOVANNI Directed by Joseph Losey Screenplay by Patricia and Joseph Losey and Frantz Salieri

Libertine, blasphemer, aristocratic scapegrace, eternal anarchist, the Don Juan of legend still enthralls and disturbs the Western consciousness. He is a figure of mythic proportions, larger than the countless works of art that have tried to contain him, from Moliere and Goldoni through Byron and Shaw. The fascination of his enigmatic psychology is apparently inexhaustible. He has been seen as a Punch-like comic character; as a tragic hero, or Nietzschean rebel against God; as a walking textbook of sexual pathology. He survives all interpretations. He will survive even this one: an opulent but confused and wrongheaded adaptation of the greatest of all Don Juan stories and perhaps the greatest of all operas, Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Conceived by Paris Opera General Director Rolf Liebermann, Don Giovanni is an attempt to go beyond the usual filmed operatic performances or made-for-TV studio productions. Joseph Losey (The Servant, The Go-Between) takes his cast of international singing stars out on location to the waterways of Venice and to some stunning Palladian villas in the countryside around Vicenza. Never mind that Ingmar Bergman's 1975 version of Mozart's The Magic Flute showed what enchanting results a modest, studio-bound production could achieve. Never mind, too, that the locale of the Don Juan legend and the setting of Mozart's opera is not Italy but Spain. The real problem is that in taking the work out of the opera house, Losey has taken a lot of the opera out of the work.

Mozart and Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte created an enormously alluring, vital protagonist who pursues his appetites with cheerful disregard for law or morality. After forcing himself on a noblewoman, Donna Anna, he duels with her father, the Commendatore, and kills him. Then, while the Don busies himself mostly with trying to seduce the peasant girl Zerlina, Donna Anna joins forces with her fiance Don Ottavio and another of the Don's conquests, Donna Elvira, to hound him through a series of comic entanglements, disguises and escapes. When a statue of the slain Commendatore comes to life and challenges the Don, he defiantly invites the statue to supper. Threatened with damnation, he remains unrepentant and true to his nature, thus taking on a perverse grandeur.

Mindful that the work was composed in 1787, on the eve of the French Revolution, Losey chooses to see it as a drama of conflict between a cynical, depleted anc`ien regime and the exploited lower orders. He tacks on an epigraph from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: ". . . the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." His Don, solemnly played by Ruggero Raimondi, is a joyless, brooding creature whose compulsive sexuality is merely a neurotic reflection of social tensions. Losey gives us the least passionate seducer on film since Fellini's curiously chilly portrait of Casanova a couple of years ago.

In Mozart's great finale, the statue arrives at the Don's supper as an agent of divine retribution. But there is no room for theology, or even for the supernatural, in the class struggle. Losey, after underplaying the hair-raising moment when the statue first speaks, dissipates its horrific arrival by treating it almost as a hallucination. Then, in one of his most bizarre touches, a glass blower's open furnace--first seen during the overture--materializes once again in the Don's house and engulfs him, in a sort of industrial accident. Don Giovanni does not exactly go to hell, but the scene does.

There is a glint of extravagant humor in the recital of the Don's conquests by his servant Leporello, with the list stretching down the steps of his house and out into the garden; but Jose Van Dam's engaging Leporello is scarcely allowed to become the buffo scalawag that Mozart and Da Ponte had in mind. Edda Moser as Donna Anna, Teresa Berganza as Zerlina, Kenneth Riegel as Don Ottavio, all throw themselves into their roles with intensity, but only the exotic Kiri Te Kanawa, as Donna Elvira, manages to shake off some of Losey's heavy seriousness. Missing are the wit and verve, the "elate darting rhythms" with which Shaw said Mozart conveyed the spirit of the work. Here the music is not as much help as it might be, since Lorin Maazel conducts it with such grim, unrelenting drive. (The complete soundtrack has been released in a three-LP set by Columbia.)

The settings are truly lovely--symmetrical Palladian porticoes, marbled rooms with glowing frescoes and statuary, formal gardens opening on cypress-dotted vistas. Losey scatters the action of the opera over every photogenic square foot of them. Characters grope endlessly down pillared corridors, wander around outdoors and are unaccountably set afloat on gondolas. Consecutive scenes shift disconcertingly from nighttime to broad daylight and back again. Most of the music is lip-synched to a prerecorded track; inside or out, wind or rain, we hear the souped-up ambience of the recording studio. The result is that characters who ought to be interacting lose touch with each other and finally with the sense of the libretto. The most absurd example is II mio tesoro intanto, in which Ottavio, supposedly at night, exhorts his friends to console Donna Anna while he goes in search of the authorities. Losey sends him strolling up and down a sunlit lawn, singing to nobody in particular, while pausing occasionally to nudge the sleeping form of some peasant sprawled in his path.

Losey adds one character not found in the original, a mysterious young valet in black who hovers wordlessly in virtually every scene of the Don's, often exchanging intimate glances with him. A nemesis? An illegitimate son? A homosexual lover? (A dubious motif also suggested by the epicene revelers at the Don's supper.) The figure, mimed with sullen sensuality by Eric Adjani (Isabelle's brother), remains cryptic and annoyingly gratuitous. He does, however, make a perfect emblem for Losey's whole approach. This Don Giovanni deserves the old line once used by Dorothy Parker to describe the Alps: beautiful but dumb.

-- Christopher Porterfield

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