But suicide tested badly with audiences, and the film’s memorably violent alternative conclusion was born.In Paris last week, with good friends Keith and Kathy, we were determined to do some serious eating. Even the film’s original ending mirrored the opera. Alex has other ideas, and the film’s dark conclusion unfolds as she refuses to follow the obedient path of her operatic double, who kills herself to avoid bringing shame upon herself and her unfaithful lover.Įchoes of Madama Butterfly are woven right through the film, from sly musical quotations embedded in Maurice Jarre’s soundtrack to the Japanese-themed party at which Alex and Dan first meet, to Alex’s peace-offering of tickets to see the opera at the Met. Amping up the volume as she cooks her lover dinner, Close instead revels in the climactic pain and anguish of Puccini’s heroine, expressed in the overwhelming music she sings just before her death.īut just as the opera’s dashing American hero Pinkerton seduces and abandons Butterfly, so Douglas’s Dan Gallagher toys with Alex, intending it to be nothing more than a passing fling.
When Michael Douglas first confesses to Glenn Close’s character that his favourite opera is Madama Butterflyshe should have run a mile. It’s musical analysis, but not like your lecturers even taught it. Thanks to Beckett’s intuitive ear we hear the music as never before, our attention drawn now to a single cello, now to a change of key. In the aria Maddalena sings about her childhood, her memories of her mother’s death at the hands of a mob during the French Revolution, and her own subsequent attempts to survive. Beckett then proceeds to talk Miller through ‘La Mamma Morta’, turning him from scepticism to sympathy as he draws him into the drama of the music. ‘Do you like opera?’, he asks a non-plussed Miller.
Beckett is playing Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier in the background. In a brave and unusual scene, the two meet to discuss the case. Hounded out of his firm when his colleagues learn about his disease, he fights their prejudice in court with Denzel Washington as his representative. Tom Hanks stars as AIDS-suffering lawyer Andrew Beckett. Nowhere is that demonstrated more clearly than in the Academy Award-winning Philadelphia. Opera gets into emotional places other music just doesn’t reach. It’s brilliantly funny, but also a brilliantly astute comment on opera’s popular association with tragedy and over-the-top emotion. Ignoring the meaning of the words altogether (Lauretta originally sings it to persuade her father to allow her to marry her penniless lover Rinuccio, threatening to throw herself in the Arno river if he refuses), Bean demonstrates the universal language of opera, transforming the aria into a mother’s song of grief over her dead son. Bean hijacks a CD-player and some props, and gives an impassioned lip-synching performance Puccini’s aria. Puccini’s ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ might be cinematically synonymous with the romance of A Room with a View, but here the aria gets a comic makeover courtesy of Rowan Atkinson at his most rubber-faced.Ī lost wallet and a sequence of accidents forces Mr Bean and his young companion Stepan to beg for money at a market. But just occasionally it can also help bring the comedy, as in this brilliant scene from Mr Bean’s Holiday. Opera is a wonderful tool for filmmakers who want to add drama or intensity to a scene – a musical shorthand for emotion and high-drama.
Cruise might be the ultimate action-hero, but when it comes to sheer bravado, Calaf leaves him in the dust. Puccini’s aria is one of opera’s greatest hits – a triumphant musical shout of confidence in which Prince Calaf vows to be the one to vanquish the princess Turandot’s three riddles and win her hand. With a little help from Simon Pegg’s laconic Benjie Lane and plenty of implausibly athletic feats, Hunt manages to see off not one but three would-be assassins, including a particularly opera-savvy one whose shot is timed precisely to the climactic final Top A of the tenor’s showpiece aria ‘Nessun Dorma’ (though if she was a real expert the Top B just beforehand might have been a better bet). He follows them to the Vienna State Opera where he believes that they are conspiring to assassinate the Austrian Chancellor. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is in pursuit of his usual brand of international criminal masterminds. It’s also a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse at the inner workings of an opera house – in this case the magnificent Vienna State Opera. This ten-minute sequence is one of cinema’s most lavish homages to opera – a scene whose tense will-he-or-won’t- he drama is every bit the equal of the music from Puccini’s Turandot that provides the soundtrack.
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