Lorin Maazel, Joseph Losey, Ruggero Raimondi, José van Dam, Edda Moser, John Macurdy, Kenneth Riegel, Teresa Berganza, Malcolm King, Kiri Te Kanawa
Second Sight DVD
Joseph Losey’s 1979 screen version of Mozart and da Ponte’s opera was a production beset with difficulties. Undertaken as a commission, Losey saw it as an opportunity to make a classic work and thrilling story more accessible by taking it out of the opera house and bringing it to a new audience at the cinema, with the advantages of the newly developed Dolby Stereo Surround process for the score. And take it out of the opera house is quite literally what Losey did, using world class opera performers and filming Don Giovanni in real Venetian locations. The intentions were good, but the results were never entirely satisfactory, either from a technical or artistic viewpoint, but recently restored by Gaumont and brought to DVD in the UK by Second Sight in a lavish 3-disc set with a DTS soundtrack, the qualities of Losey’s version of Mozart’s dark masterpiece can certainly be better appreciated.
The exploits of Don Giovanni are renowned the world over, his seduction of ladies across the continent – young and old, ugly and beautiful, rich and poor alike (anything in a skirt really) - constituting an impressive tally (2065 at the last count), one that is dutifully noted and recorded by his valet Leporello (José van Dam). On one particular night however, Don Giovanni (Ruggero Raimondi) takes his libertine ways a little too far, slipping into the room of Donna Anna (Edda Moser) for an attempted seduction, but in his haste to remain anonymous and beat a hasty retreat, he kills her father, Il Commendatore (John Macurdy), who has arrived to defend her honour. Donna Anna is devastated by what has occurred and calls on her fiancé Don Ottavio (Kenneth Riegel), in the manner of any good dramatic opera, to avenge his blood.
They’ll have to move quickly to keep up with Don Giovanni however, who has quickly moved on to his next conquest – a young peasant girl named Zerlina (Teresa Berganza), who he rakishly intends to seduce on the eve of her marriage to Masetto (Malcolm King). They find an ally however in the form of Donna Elvira (Kiri Te Kanawa), another woman who has fallen victim to his charms only to be immediately abandoned after their wedding. Discovering that Don Giovanni is up to his old tricks, she does everything in her power to save other women from a similar fate. Pursued on all sides – Masetto is none too pleased with the behaviour of the cavalier either – Don Giovanni’s wicked past is about to catch up with him.
Mozart’s darkest opera, based on a long literary tradition going back to Tirso de Molina, is a subject with a fascinating variety of social and behavioural issues, with enough complex themes and contradictory elements to provide rich ground for any director to work with (it was recently effectively updated into a modern setting for the Paris Opéra by the filmmaker Michael Haneke under the opera’s original title - Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni). Joseph Losey’s film version however is rather traditional in its period setting and, barring the superb use of original locations, is also somewhat unimaginative in its staging. Certainly, the conditions of the filming present a number of difficulties, using world class opera singers, taking them away from the familiar surroundings of a opera stage and subjecting them to a cinematic stop-start form of performance very different from what they are used to, one that is dependent upon the setting up of technical equipment and outdoor weather conditions. Moreover, the singers have to concentrate on lip-syncing to already recorded performances, since dragging the orchestra of the Opéra de Paris around the locations for the length of the production for a live recording is completely unfeasible.
Even despite the evident technical constraints however, there is little evidence of Losey placing any kind of personal stamp or interpretation on the material. Technically, it is often brilliant – the use of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda Venetian mansion provides a perfect, stunning backdrop for the performances, and Losey certainly manages to direct and stage the opera’s female characters - whose role is so vital to the dynamic of the piece - extremely well. The scene where Donna Anna recognises the murderer of her father is chilling - image, tone and performance coming together in perfect harmony. Her character is balanced with the resigned, but determined Donna Elvira, who believes despite all evidence that Don Giovanni’s salvation can be still somehow be attained, and the flighty and independent Zerlina, who believes she can handle the cavalier (and her husband Masetto) on her own terms. The principal male characters are less well defined, with surprisingly little evidence of the black humour, complicity and even the latent homosexuality that can be drawn from the relationship between Don Giovanni and his valet Leporello. The use of real opera singers doesn’t help make a successful transition from stage to screen either. The performers are all fine actors, and the female performances are often exceptional, but they remain stage performances, prone to mannerisms and exaggeration - the worst offender being Masetto, who overacts dreadfully - which don’t work well or at all naturally on the screen.
All is not lost however. The locations are well used, and Mozart and da Ponte’s opera is so rich, musically, lyrically and thematically that even a straightforward traditional depiction of its power play, sexual politics and thrilling revenge story make the film an often thrilling romp, with Ruggero Raimondi a fine Don Giovanni. And in terms of the opera itself, there is certainly much to admire in the performances of the singers and things to discover in the minor tweaking in the instrumentation of Mozart’s brooding, playful and lyrical music score. While the staging is period, traditional and certainly operatic in dramatic terms, Losey does manage to impose a tone on the piece with the presence of a “black valet” in a non-singing role. This figure does manage to bring some sense of ambiguity to the proceedings, but his impassive presence is more that of an impartial spectator, mournful but resigned to inevitable downfall and death of his master, but even this is something that is already implicit within the music, the libretto and most obviously within the nature of Don Giovanni himself.
DVD
Don Giovanni is released in the UK by Second Sight as a 3-disc set. The film is spread across two dual-layer discs separating the opera with a natural division between Act 1 and Act 2. The extra features are contained on a third dual-layer disc. The set is in PAL format, and is encoded for Region 2.
Video
The extra features go into quite a bit of detail on the restoration and remastering of the audio track, but there is no mention of how much work went into cleaning-up the image quality. On the evidence of what you can see however, there must have been quite a bit of work done for the image to look as impressive as it does here, although some elements of the transfer are less than perfect. The print itself looks remarkably clear, free from even the smallest mark or dustspot. The original 1.66:1 aspect ratio is retained and presented with anamorphic enhancement, transferred progressively. As a result, the image is remarkably stable and free from any brightness flicker whatsoever, to such an extent that in places the film looks as if it had been shot yesterday in Digital High Definition.
Such an appearance does give the impression that the image has been heavily filtered and indeed, contrast is not strong, with the image tending towards brightness, dulled colours and flattened blacks, making the film look like it is permanently in the shadow of dusk. Skin tones, often a good indicator of the correctness of colouration, look slightly off and lacking fine detail, though the performers are certainly heavily made-up in line with the period. Close-ups however reveal a rainbow cross-colouration effect. There are some other minor issues with the digital transfer, with some stepping in lines caused by compression and edge-enhancement. Surprisingly, considering that the film is spread across 2 dual-layer discs, the full capacity of the discs hasn’t been taken advantage of, Disc One taking up 6.08GB and Disc Two only 5.64GB. Overall however, the transfer is stable, detail is good and the print itself is just about flawless.
Audio
Clearly the most important aspect in an opera film is to get the music right, and in this area it’s hard to find fault. It clearly wasn’t an easy task, since Losey and Raimondi were never happy with the original mix provided by a Dolby Stereo system still in its early stages of development. An enormous amount of work however has gone into finding and restoring the original 16-track master, and the results speak for themselves. Reworked by the original sound engineers, the new DTS 5.1 96/24 mix is astonishingly good, achieving a wonderfully warm rounded tone with good definition in the low-frequency range, while remaining stable and free from distortion on the higher end. Much of the recitative was done on location and still suffers slightly from the reverb of the original surroundings, but has been remixed and improved as much as possible to fit in with the pre-recorded elements. While the music and singing obviously dominates, the use of surround effects is also well distributed, not making the surrounds overly busy, but blending in well with the natural ambience.
All of this wouldn’t be worth the effort if the sound was not pitch corrected to allow for the 4% PAL speed-up issues when transferring the elements to DVD for home viewing, but thankfully and essentially, that seems to have been done at least for both the DTS mix and for the new remastered Dolby Digital Surround score. The much-maligned original Dolby Digital Surround mix is also included, but is of little value other than for comparison to the thundering DTS mix, which is really in a different league altogether. It’s hard to imagine how the original elements could be made to sound much better than this.
Subtitles
The opera is sung in the original Italian, with optional English subtitles provided in a clear white font. The subtitles are fine and do a reasonable job of translating the libretto.
Extras
About Don Giovanni (26:17)
An archive French television documentary covers the making of the film in quite a bit of detail. Losey and a narrator guide the viewer through the locations and the reasoning behind the filming choices made. There is extensive footage of the director on set, shooting scenes and numerous retakes.
Losey and Don Giovanni (15:21)
Subtitled “a thematic analysis by Michel Ciment”, the French film critic for Positif covers the history, and reputation of Losey from a French perspective and examines the revolutionary themes in Don Giovanni which he feels mirror Losey’s own circumstances to some extent and are recurrent in the director’s work.
The Sound Odyssey 1978 – 2006 (41:19)
The most detailed documentary among the extra features covers the extensive work that went into recovering and restoring the original masters as closely as they could be to the intention Losey had but was unable to achieve with the technology of the time. At the same time, there is a desire to correct original errors and improve on the original through remixing. The restoration process - literally “baking” the original masters - is explained in great detail, making this a fascinating feature, one that makes the achievement of the restoration team even more admirable.
Trailer (3:46)
The original trailer makes use of selected striking scenes from the film and is set to the opera’s overture, and is very effective.
Overall
Joseph Losey’s screen movie version of Don Giovanni certainly takes the opera out of the theatre, but doesn’t manage to take the theatricality out of the opera. Other than the use of real locations, there is little imagination shown in the rather stiff period staging, and little invention shown in the interpretation of the characters or themes of the opera. Mozart and da Ponte’s genius remains clearly evident however, and even though traditionally staged, Don Giovanni remains a lively, lyrical, provocative, dynamic and timeless masterpiece. Those qualities are brought out in the astonishing restoration work that has been carried out on the film’s original score for this DVD release, which Second Sight have certainly done justice to in their lavish Deluxe 3-disc set.
This review was originally published in DVD Times/The Digital Fix in 2008
