Several months ago the gossip columns carried an item that Cannon Films, which is producing and distributing Franco Zeffirelli`s ”Otello,” was trying to keep music critics away from screenings of the movie. The company reportedly was concerned that the music people would review ”Otello” as an opera rather than as the cinematic translation of the Verdi opera that Zeffirelli put on celluloid.
Well, nobody tried to bar this music critic from seeing ”Otello” (now playing in Chicago at the Biograph Theater) and I know of no colleague who was reduced to pounding on the padlocked doors of his friendly neighborhood screening room. As a matter of fact, I have noticed that the reviewers who seem to have been the hardest on Zeffirelli`s ”Otello” have been the film critics.
Actually, it`s become pretty much a reviewer`s article of faith that when the Italian director ventures a film adaptation of a famous opera (”La Traviata”) or play (”Romeo and Juliet,” ”The Taming of the Shrew”), what emerges is a lavish Zeffirellian gloss on the original, loaded down with all the devices for which he has long been noted–spectacular designs, opulent cinematography, irrelevant artifice, a lush extravagance of style and a tumid emotionalism that are far larger in scale than anything known to the lyric or legitimate theaters.
So it is with ”Otello.” The film is beautiful to look at, and, even with the soundtrack harshly amplified, it is often marvelous to listen to.
Placido Domingo as the tortured Moor, Katia Ricciarelli as the radiant Desdemona and Justino Diaz as the reptilian Iago are practiced Verdians of the opera stage.
Lorin Maazel leads the combined forces of the mighty La Scala Opera in a fervent exposition of the Verdi score–that is, as much of the music as Zeffirelli chooses to include.
The location settings (the Greek isle of Crete functions as a stand-in for Venetian Cyprus of the 15th Century) are lovingly captured by Ennio Guarnieri`s rich photography.
So why does Zeffirelli`s film seem so clunky and unsatisfying, a grander- than-grand-opera epic that finally vandalizes the opera it means to honor?
The essential problem is not that artistically respectable movies cannot be made of Verdi operas. Zeffirelli proved they could in 1982 with his big-screen version of ”La Traviata,” also starring Domingo. But ”Traviata” is a less formally rigorous work than ”Otello,” far better suited to Zeffirelli`s romantic sensibility than the later Verdi work, with its penetrating insights into the darker caverns of the human soul.
No, the basic trouble is that the director was so intent on capturing the image of Verdi`s ”Otello” that he failed to realize its lifeblood. Not only does the film misuse Verdi`s magnificent score (in the name of ”improving”
it), but it misses the taut progression of dramatic incident that makes the opera such a masterpiece of musical theater–its feet keep getting tangled in Zeffirelli`s sumptuous decor and narrative asides.
Zeffirelli`s restless lens tracks the characters through corridors and courtyards, prowling around dungeons and armories, sniffing around battlements and bedchambers for portentous symbols (spears, grillework, crucifixes) to pass off as emblems of dramatic truth. You wish the camera would settle down and let the singers sing, but it seldom does.
Zeffirelli persists in denying what the music tells us: the love duet takes place in Desdemona`s boudoir and ends atop a rampart, not in a garden suffused with the magic of moonlight and stars. At other times the director likes to put things front-and-center that Verdi, his librettist Arigo Boito and Shakespeare kept discreetly offstage, if they ever imagined at all. In this version Otello kills Iago with a well-aimed spear in the back. Is this
”Otello” or ”Gotterdammerung”?
Because Zeffirelli refuses to do anything by halves, too many scenes bulge with clutter. Where the libretto calls for a crowd of Cypriots and soldiers to cheer Gen. Otello`s victorious homecoming, the director fills the screen with what appears to be the entire population of Crete, cutting busily between the chorus of Cypriots on the quay and the Moor`s storm-tossed galleon as it nears port. Although drenched by the heaviest rains this side of Bangladesh, the lusty mob, their mouths agape, manage to keep on singing without gargling a note.
Much controversy has been generated by Zeffirelli`s decision, for reasons of cinematic economy, to remove roughly a half-hour of music from the score and then to insert ballet music (written by Verdi for the Paris premiere of
”Otello”) into the first act where it doesn`t belong. (For the statistically minded, the film runs 122 minutes; a complete performance of the opera might average 145.)
When Verdi and Boito omitted scenes from Shakespeare`s ”Othello,” they did so with care and conviction, tightening the dramatic focus, clarifying motivation, raising the original to an entirely new artistic dimension. But a work as tightly crafted as the Verdi-Boito ”Otello” resists such tampering. Zeffirelli`s excisions succeed only in making the film appear longer than an uncut performance of the opera.
For example: It is one thing to jettison Desdemona`s willow song (her
”Ave Maria” is spared the Zeffirelli axe), quite another to trim whole chunks of the third act, one of the most subtly constructed in the entire Verdi canon. Gone is the ensemble during which Iago and Roderigo plot to murder Cassio–thus rendering meaningless the later news that Cassio has killed Roderigo.
These amputations tend to confuse the very dramatic issues they would illuminate. No sooner has Iago drawn Otello`s attention to Cassio speaking with Desdemona in the garden than the Moor is burning with jealous rage. If Otello really does entertain a sincere belief in his wife`s gentle, innocent nature (as he professed in the love duet just minutes before), it is unlikely that Iago`s poison would have changed his mind so quickly.
Fortunately, EMI/Angel has issued an ”original cast” soundtrack album
(DSB-3993, two LPs; CDCB-47450, two compact discs) that contains all the missing music. It goes to the head of the list of currently available
”Otello” recordings, and the sound is far superior to that of the previous Domingo version on RCA, for all the musical virtues of that performance.
One cannot depict a grand subject, Zeffirelli would argue, without opening it up on a grand scale. Fair enough; but do we really need as many illustrative flashbacks as ”Otello” gives us? Zeffirelli interrupts the sublime love duet, ”Gia nella notte,” to show the young Otello`s abduction into black slavery, the early life together of Desdemona and Otello, their courtship and wedding. The problem here is not so much the interruption itself as Zeffirelli`s falling into the common trap of confusing Moors with blacks;
actually, they are a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent.
Also, what on earth did the director have in mind by showing us Cassio
(Urbano Barberini), naked on his bed, lost in erotic reverie, mouthing the words that Iago is whispering to Otello? The way Zeffirelli sets up the shot, the unwary may easily be led into believing, as does the Moor, that Cassio`s dream is real instead of merely a fabrication of Iago`s. This is misplaced voyeurism, nothing more.
Of the performers, the one who comes off the best is Diaz`s Iago. A bass- baritone in a role normally taken by a lyrical baritone, Diaz savors the dark shadings at the lower end of Iago`s music, portraying him as a cunning monster of nihilistic evil. He supplies so much of the film`s electricity that you can see why at one time Verdi even thought of calling his opera ”Iago.”
If Ricciarelli`s soprano is sometimes literally a whisper of its former lyric self, she brings an innocence, vulnerability and patrician grace to her role that are appealing, and the camera plainly adores her pale, blonde radiance.
Domingo is our finest exponent of the operatic Otello, and here he rises to every vocal challenge with exceptional fervor, dignity, grandeur and even subtlety. As an actor, however, he remains fairly stolid, and the all-purpose knitted-brow (meant to convey inner conflict) that we accept on the opera stage becomes tiresome as magnified on the big screen. In the early scenes Zeffirelli has him play the Moor as a Renaissance man, cultured and intelligent, making Otello`s dabbling in pagan rituals at the end seem ludicrous.
Finally, a word about the subtitles, which don`t always match the Italian words that we hear, or the fancy images that we see. Perhaps the most revealing line comes after Otello, in front of a hall filled with horrified guests, has accused Desdemona of being a harlot. ”Stricken, in the livid dust, I lie,” reads the caption–as Ricciarelli crouches on a decidedly luxurious, decidedly non-livid Oriental rug. Silly.
At its best, ”Otello” captures the claustrophobic feel of the ancient stone walls that imprison the Moor, turning his deepest fears and insecurities into raging jealousy. When Iago snarls his manifesto of evil, the famous
”Credo,” the camera spins vertiginous circles around Diaz, as if all of Christendom were recoiling at his blasphemy. The scene ends with Iago`s gloating cackle echoing monstrously in the depths of a cistern. Zeffirelli`s play of imagery, place and mood is dazzling–even if his excesses of style finally overwhelm his subject.
