DIRECTED BY: Christiane Cegavske

FEATURING: With one minor exception, all characters are silent animated puppets

PLOT:  A group of aristocratic white mice commission rodentlike creatures with beaks (called the “Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak”) to create a doll for them, but once the puppet is fashioned the Creatures refuse to give it up; instead, they revere it and sew an egg they find floating in a creek inside its torso.  The mice steal the doll and take it to their lair, so the Creatures set out on a journey to recover it.  Along the way they meet a frog sorcerer and a spider with a human face, and everything changes when the egg inside the doll hatches.

BACKGROUND:

• The film took 13 years to make, with Cegavske animating perhaps 10 seconds a day.  Many of the models and effects used show up in the director’s 1992 short Blood and Sunflowers.
• Cegavske intends for Blood Tea and Red String to be part of a trilogy, and in 2011 she announced the second part of the project, titled Seed in the Sand.  She estimates this installment will take five years to complete.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Blood Tea is bizarre throughout, and many will be attracted to the psychedelic splashiness of the sequence where the Oak Dwellers eat hallucinogenic berries and see morphing pink and green leaf patterns overlaid on the courtyard garden.  For my money, though, things are at the weirdest when we climb inside the dark mouse hole and watch the well-dressed vermin pour bloody tea onto the lips of the lifeless doll while their skull-headed pet raven looks on.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A dialogue-free stop-motion animated fable done in the style of Jan

Original trailer for Blood Tea and Red String

Svankmajer, but with a darkly feminine spin, Blood Tea and Red String gently folds surrealism into its fairy tale structure to create a weirdly compelling world.  It’s an inverted Alice, told from the perspective of mutant rodents, depraved white mice, and mystical frogs.

COMMENTS:  Artist Christiane Cegavske had been living with the haunting creatures of Blood Tea and Red String in her head for years before bringing them to life.  Her first visions of white mice were far more terrifying than the subtly unsettling red-eyed rodents who eventually made it to the screen.  In their first appearance in a Cegavske painting, the vermin torture a nude, bound woman in a rose garden: two of the creatures threaten her breasts with massive scissors, while a third kneels between her spread legs, sewing her up with red string.

Cegavske’s view of the creatures had softened by the time she conceived the story for Blood Tea, and their menace subsided into a background aura.  In her DVD commentary the artist consistently speaks of these creatures, along with other denizens of her subconscious world like the Oak Dwellers (sort of a mutant hybrid of shrews and crows), as if they were real beings with an independent existence; she has learned some things about them, she tells us, but does not pretend to have all the answers.  She confesses that she does not know the name of the Spider, or where the mice get the hemoglobin to brew their favorite beverage, or where the Frog finds the hearts he uses in his magic rituals.  Her understanding of the creatures evolved over time, and with greater familiarity it seems she no longer sees them as terrifying, as did the young girl who painted the first image of torturer mice.  By the time of Blood Tea the characters had become ambiguous, mysterious fairy tale creatures with inscrutable habits and customs, unfit to be judged by human standards.

I’m not implying Cegavske is a crazy woman who literally sees visions of twisted creatures and catalogs their behavior like some schizophrenic crypto-anthropologist.  It’s just that she honors these characters’ subconscious origins; she conceives of each entity in a dream and slowly cultivates a relationship with it, letting it divulge to her what it will over a period of many years.  Her approach to characterization is patiently Surrealist.  When she finally unleashed the results of her studies of these beings and their curious customs on the world, they simultaneously appear fully fleshed-out, breathing creatures, yet they remain full of secrets.

The affluent mice have somehow discovered a vintage Victorian portrait of a human woman with blood-red cheeks and lips, and they want the Oak Dwellers (obviously this world’s premier artisans) to create a simulacrum for them. The Oak Dwellers do so, but fall in love with their own creation, sew up an egg they find floating in a stream inside it, and mount it on their tree like a crucified savior (or a scarecrow).  The mice, arriving in the night in their turtle-drawn carriage, steal the doll and take it back to a mouse hole full of ticking clocks, where they get drunk on blood and play a game where they deal out hands of blank cards.  Meanwhile, the Oak Dwellers put on cloaks and set out on a journey to recover their creation.  They encounter carnivorous plants, but are saved by an amphibian wizard who feeds the hungry pods hearts in place of their prey.  And so it goes.  The story has the outline of a fairy tale or an epic fantasy quest that makes it easy enough to follow, but the details are gnarled, amazing and strange.  It’s a near-perfect blend of surrealism and story, with no language to nail it down to a single meaning (the Dweller’s squawks and the mice’s squeaks convey only the most basic of emotions, like anger or alarm).

The world Cegavske fashions recalls the earliest folk versions of fairy tales—before they were refashioned by Victorian moralists to teach children useful behavioral lessons—stories set in lands populated by inscrutable magical creatures with obscure motivations.  The meanings of these tales, which accrued and mutated over generations, are often unclear and often amoral; the point of the stories, invented to amuse, is to evoke wonder.  But meanings do suggest themselves, seeping through the fabric of the tale.  Though Blood Tea and Red String is decidedly and deliberately undidactic, motifs of female reproduction poke through the story.  The title itself subtly evokes a feminine hygiene product, and an obvious image of menstruation occurs with a shot of blood leaking between the doll’s feet.  Eggs are an important symbol, and are even kept inside the doll (the only clearly female character in this otherwise sexless world).  There is a pregnancy and a birth (rendered grotesquely, Alien style).  Creatures are continually being wrapped up into womblike containers—the carnivorous plant pods which envelop the sleeping Oak Dwellers, the spider that tighly wraps its captured prey in a red string cocoon, a corpse sewn snugly into a leaf coffin.  There are fewer symbols of the male reproductive system, but they do appear, in the form of acorns.  This seed first appears nonchalantly affixed to the lead Dweller’s staff.  Later the crew gets drunk on Frog’s brew (sipped from nut cups) and see a vision of an acorn which splits open and turns into an egg.  Why this reproductive imagery is in the movie is unclear (perhaps it has to do with the project’s long gestation), but it does help unify the unconscious rhythms of the film, while distantly linking the story to ancient fertility myths.

Visually, Blood Tea owes much of its look to Czech Surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer, an influence whom Cegavske is eager to credit.  The white mice fashion their sartorial style on Alice‘s white rabbit, down to their white ruffled collars and scarlet frock coats.  Most of Cegavske’s models have that weathered, antique quality—like leftover wooden toys from a pre-plastic era—typical of the objects Svankmajer loves to animate.  Yet, while she takes cues from the Czech master, Cegavske does create a style of her own, by setting her action not in the real world but inside of carefully composed, pastoral dioramas that resemble children’s pop-up storybooks.  Svankmajer confines his creatures in claustrophobic interiors, but for the most part Cegavske lets hers roam in open fields and gardens—gardens where the sunflowers have faces.

Blood Tea‘s animation is necessarily herky-jerky, but the style works in favor of the mythical material by removing the action one step from reality while still remaining rooted in the physical world.  Like the movie’s story and visuals, Mark Growden’s score is off-key yet oddly melodic, mixing calliopes with recorders or lutes with a Jew’s harp to create tunes which sound medieval and otherworldly at the same time.

For a project that took an amazing thirteen years to complete, it’s remarkable that Blood Tea and Red String isn’t overly thought out—and I mean that as a compliment.  Half-rodent, half-crow creatures who live in oak trees and build dolls for blood-addicted mice don’t need extensive backstories.  It’s enough to know they tend sunflowers, sew eggs into puppets, and implicitly trust mystical frogs who carry endless supplies of hearts beneath their robes.  What seems like randomness to us to them is ritual.  We should feel honored and privileged to glimpse these noble and elegant creatures as they trek about their Faerie world on wispy business we’re too thick and pragmatic to fully comprehend.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a David Lynchean fever dream on Beatrix Potter terrain… Often grotesque, though never in the ‘Sick and Twisted’ juvenile gross-out mode, dreamlike feature is as lovingly crafted as it is unsettlingly sour-sweet, with Mark Growden’s avant-garde folk score in perfect synch.”–Dennis Harvey, Variety (festival screening)

“…the tale becomes both increasingly macabre and bizarrely poignant… if the tale’s moral is less than clear, its haunting images speak directly to some dark, preverbal corner of the heart.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

“In a word, crazy, but while Cegavske’s craft… is nothing if not painstaking, her story unravels dispassionately, and with zero sexual innuendo—an arbitrary string of strange happenings that starve for subtext.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Blood Tea and Red String - There’s only a little bit of information on this page—plot synopsis, quotes from favorable reviews, and links to buy Blood Tea merchandise—but you may enjoy poking around the rest of christianecegavske.com

IMDB LINK: Blood Tea and Red String (2006)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Blood Tea & Red String Panel – Brief clip of Cegavske discussing the film and her influences at the Anime L.A. convention in 2007

Seed in the Sand by Christiane Cegavske – Kickstarter – Information on the second part of the intended trilogy that started with Blood Tea and Red String, including a plot synopsis and a peek at a set.  The project is already funded.

DVD INFO: The Cinema Epoch DVD (buy) contains a wealth of revealing background material, as befits a labor of love like Blood Tea and Red String.  Cegavske shares some of her “miniature paintings” (many of which appear in the film) and shows and discusses the sketches in which the characters from Blood Tea first revealed themselves to her in a segment called “character and story development.”  The brief, narrated survey of “production stills” gives us insight into the sets and provides us with a sense of scale.  Most important and interesting is the commentary, which takes the form of a conversation between the creator and actor/film critic Luke Y. Thompson.  In the commentary Cegavske seems shy, very much the distracted artist; she’s pained to give answers to certain questions, but she warms up enthusiastically when talking about her creations.  She has a refreshingly different personality than most directors: she comes off as a cool, weird chick with an eternal girlishness about her.

(This movie was nominated for review by NGboo, who called it “one of the most creative and imaginative fantasies. Surreal, enigmatic, bittersweet, cutely-morbid & bizarre stop-motion animation.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Now what is an artist to do with such a ludicrous plot?  As he often did when tackling an absurd libretto, Mozart responded with inspired music.  In the true Mozartean spirit, director Doris Dorrie has just as much fun with Giardiniera as when she bounced through her 2003 staging of Cosi fan Tutte (set in the psychedelic 60′s flower children era).  Dorrie’s personality is stamped all over this charming production.  Primary colors abound.

The opening fight between Belfiore (John Mark Ainsley from Zaide) and Violante (Alexandra Reinprecht) is performed as a ballet in the opera’s overture (and done true to period—traditionalists, do not get your hopes up).  Dorrie and set designer Bernd Lepel replace the garden estate with a busy, 21st century superstore.  A black leather clad Ramiro (mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose) looks like an extra from Road Warrior (1981), while the two leads are still adorned in powdered wigs, making for whimsical contrast.  Veronique Gens’s Arminda could give Cruella de Ville competition and she delights in tormenting her poor Ramiro (Donose supplies meaty angst).  Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors (1986) shows up ( I kid you not), chomps down on both Belfiore and Violante, thus generating their “madness’—which takes place in a spider’s den with an arachnid that’s about as animated as Jack Arnold’s Tarantula (1955).  But, it’s all in good fun, even if a good thirty minutes of music has been excised, and if conductor Ivor Bolton and his orchestra don’t seem to have as much fun as Dorrie and company.

Dorrie wonderfully succeeds in elevating what could have been a lackluster event into a spirited Halloween-like Mozartean treat.

In 1769 the twelve year old Mozart composed his three-act opera buffa La finta semplice (The Pretend Simpleton) to a libretto by poet Marco Coltellini, which was in turn based off of Carlo Goldoni’s comedy.  It is one of the most appetizing of Mozart’s early operas.

Captain Fracasso and his sergeant Simone are stationed at the home of two wealthy, foolhardy brothers: Don Cassandro and Don Polidoro. Cassandro and Polidoro have a sister, Giacinta, with whom Fracasso is smitten.  Simone is chasing after the maid, Ninetta. Cassandro, a notorious misogynist, is continually at odds with his womanizing brother.  Fracasso’s sister, Rosina, arrives to help her brother and, with Ninetta’s assistance, Rosina attempts to seduce both Cassandro and Polidoro.  Rosina plays the part of a sexy simpleton, and she is quite successful with Cassandro.  After a night of much drinking, the brothers quarrel over Rosina (leading to a comic duel).  The quarreling is followed by dizzying amorous intrigue and romantic mix-ups.  The brothers are lead to believe that Giacanta has run off with Simone and taken the estate’s treasure with him.  Finally, Rosina, Giacanta and Ninetta end up with their chosen lovers. Only Polidoro walks away empty-handed, which leaves him happily single and unfettered.

Schlomer’s trilogy, beginning with La finta semplice, is not an odyssey for the simpleton, or the timid Mozartean opera goer.  Refreshingly, his is a richly complex, adult odyssey, which encompasses determination, crisis, confusion and eventually, possible liberation.  In La finta semplice, Schlomer replaces the recitatives with German narration (the original, Italian arias are retained).  The result here is an extraordinary tightening of the lyrical and farcical experience.  The new dialogue is delivered by an additional character named Auctoritas, hypnotically played by actress Marianne Hamre (in a bright yellow body suit, which the actress wittily referred to as her ’Kill Bill’ costume).  Hamre’s characterization embraces Brechtian concepts, acting out the narration and interacting with the opera’s characters.  With the exception of Hamre, the sets and costumes, designed by Jens Kilian, are minimalistic and devoid of color: bridal whites.  Malin Hartelius, as Rosina, commands the triangular stage.  Another addition, “Dark Rosina” (played by Anna Tenta), is a mute appendage who amusingly, and hauntingly, choreographs Rosina’s movements, until Rosina frees herself.  The Act II love duet between Rosina and Cassandro (Josef Wagner) is capped by an off-the-meter amorous dance.  Schlomer, a notable choreographer and dancer himself, intelligently directs Hartelius: she sings one thing, but dances another, acting out the Rosina underneath the simpleton facade.  The duel between the brothers becomes a battle of animated weapons.  It is so unexpected and surreal that you half expect Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny to show up.  Silvia Moi (Ninetta), Jeremy Ovanden (Fracasso), Matthisas Klink (Polidoro, who, in this version, does get a girl—the narrator Hamre), Marina Comparato and Mijenko Turk make up the rest of a cast with vibrant personality (how about red bras and body paint to off-set the virginal white?).  Michael Hofstetter conducts the Camerata Salzburg as if he and his orchestra get the joke.

Abendempfindung (Evening Sensation) is the second evening of Odysseys. This is not an opera at all, but a pasticcio of Mozart arias, music (including works for glass harmonica), and letters.  The legendary soprano Ann Murray plays “the Singer,” the first of three allegorical characters that represent the artist Mozart at a dissatisfied stage in his life (culled from depressing letters he wrote while in Salzburg).  More than that, the three symbolize the life struggles of artists in the world.  Marianne Hamre is the second representation (“the Actress”) and Graham Smith the third (“the Dancer”).

Murray’s delivery of the Abendempfindung aria is sensitive and blue.  Perched on a suitcase, she contemplates suicide as a way to change trajectory.  She is dependent on others and longs for complete freedom, which does not come with financial security.  This meditative theme is continued by the actress and dancer.  The three principals, each through their unique artistic expression, convey a wistful defiance in the onslaught of challenges.  Ethereal, digital imagery is hauntingly utilized to echo their fractured plight.  Hamre’s radiant dive in a pool strikes a gossamer note.  Rather than a concise narrative, Abendemfindung draws the viewer into strangely intimate visuals and emotive fragmentation.

The third evening, titled Rex tremendus, combines two unfinished Mozart operas–Lo Sposo deluso (The Disappointed Bridegroom) and L’ Oca del Cairo (The Cairo Goose)—together with movements from the unfinished “Requiem.”  Mozart scholar Erik Smith gave the first prepared performance of the unfinished operas several years ago.  In Bridegroom, Bocconio Papparelli plans to marry the considerably younger Eugenia, whom he has never met.  Boccino’s confidant is the misogynist Pulcherio.  Pulcherio realizes that Eugenia is actually in love with her former lover, the Tuscan officer, Don Asdrubale.  Pulcherio has sympathy for Eugenia, and he too falls in love with Bocconio.  Boccino’s vain niece, Bettina, is competing for the love of Asdrubale.  Metilda (a singer) and Gervasio (Eugenia’s tutor) are also thrown into the chaotic mix of confused romance.

The Cairo Goose tells the story of Celidora and Lavina.  The women have been imprisoned by Don Pippo.  Pippo has ambitions to marry Lavina, but she is in love with Calandrino.  Celidora is the chosen bride for Count Lionetto, but she is in love with Biondello.  Calandrino is flirting with the maid, Aureeta,which arouses the jealousy of Auretta’s lover, Chicchibio.  Biondello rescues Celidora and Lavina and, together, they escape to the garden.  At this point the opera ends without the appearance of a goose.

Schlomer and cast embrace the fragmentary nature of the works, and treat Rex tremendus as Mozartean performance art.  The cast from the first two evenings return. Again, Hamre is the M.C.  Murray dissipates as she is enclosed in the glass space of melancholic reflections.  Here, geese do briefly appear, like relics being taken to a faraway temple.  Aimlessness and confusion abound, but Hamre, having taken everything in, seems to be moving towards something.  The evening fades as Hamre emerges, dressed in a new, virtuous white.  Although she has, in part, come to symbolize the composer, it is she that we feel have come closest to knowing.  She lights a cigarette.  She is inexplicably moved in the sanctuary of the Requiem’s lacrimosa.  Of course,this sanctuary is temporary, but it will suffice.  This simple ending gives comforting flesh to the Requiem, far more than the plethora of edified iconography normally associated with the composer’s final work.  Thankfully, Schlomer and ensemble remove Mozart from his pedestal, and feel as if they are replacing the opera house with the intimacy of an concert performed in our own house, swimming pool, cafe, or a little art gallery.

Predictably, Schlomer’s vision has critics, one of who pointedly complained that Murray’s skirt was too short for opera.  The scope of Irrfahrten never gets in the way of personality. There is nothing so predictable as an obvious, pedestrian ”lesson” to be had here.  Rather, this is penetrating communion.  I wanted it to go on.  Joy in repetition.  That is something, I think.

Director Michael Sturminger, Blagoj Nacoski as Scipione, Louise Friba as Constancy and Bernarda Bobro as Fortune flesh out the composer’s conflicting priorities in a Buñuel-esque reverie. With Mozart’s later Giovanni, familiarity breeds contempt.  Scipione is Giovanni’s alter ego.  He finds refuge and passion within Constancy’s joy in repetition.  Constancy, coming off, at first, as a June Cleaver type, even has children here, yet she, like Buñuel’s suburban Severine, is also erotically unhinged.
Here, Friba sings Constancy’s amazingly difficult aria, “Biancheggia in mar scoglio,” while simulating a graphic sex act with Nacoski’s enchanted Scipione pinned to the bridal bed.  It is the kitten Constancy who wins Scipione.  Alas, Bobor’s voluptuous Fortune doesn’t stand a chance; she materializes as the living embodiment of “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

The opulent set designs of Renate Martin and Andreas Donhauser enhance Sturminger’s phantasmagoric cosmos where heaven is a swank hotel. Pubilius ‘aria sung from a casket and Aemillius’sage advices sung while playing golf with a miniature earth are among the quirky touches in this production.   The spirited conducting by the young Robin Ticciati compliments the actors and Sturminger’s direction.  Normally, at least on record, this dramatic serenade is a painfully dull affair (the Peter Schrier, Lucia Popp performance is a wonderful exception to the rule).  The M22 team makes what is normally dismissed as lesser, early Mozart into one of the zippier and stronger efforts of the Salzburg project.  As good as the rest of the cast and company are, however, it is the firebrand Fribo who leaves all the other good efforts in the dust.  She is a remarkably gifted singer and performer who convinces us that Scipione’s choice is an excellent one.  If only she had been sent Giovanni’s way.  She easily could have pacified that formidable beast behind her white picket fence.

Ascanio in Alba (libretto by the satirical poet Giuseppe Parini) is a classical celebration of marriage, set in pastoral, mythical Alba.  Ascanio, the son of Venus and Aenus, is engaged to the nymph Silvia and is destined to rule.  For the proceeding four years Cupid, in Ascanio’s form, has courted Silvia in her dreams.  The time has come for Ascanio to meet Silvia, but Venus has a condition: he cannot not reveal his true identity to the nymph.  This is Venus’ test of Silvia’s virtue.  Fauno, ruler of the Alban shepherds, acts as Silvia’s chaperon and implores Ascanio to honor Silvia’s modesty.  The priest Aceste attempts to assure Silvia that the man in her dreams is the very same Ascanio to whom she is engaged.  Silvia meets Ascanio and believes she recognizes him as the man of her dreams, but Fauno, under Venus’ instructions, convinces Silvia that she is mistaken.  Saddened, Silvia becomes listless and gravely ill in her distress.  She announces she will never love anyone other than the Ascanio of her dreams.  When Ascanio approaches her, she flees him.  Silvia’s virtue is confirmed ,and Aceste  assures her that her trials are at an end.  Venus, surrounded by clouds, descends by chariot and unites the two lovers.  As Aceste binds the lovers, and proclaims his own fidelity to Venus, the matriarchal goddess departs, leaving Ascanio and Silvia to prosper.

“Mozart is lucky he’s dead” wrote one critic when reviewing David Hermann’s M22 staging of Ascanio in Alba.  The reviews for this have been universally dreadful.  Ascanio in Alba is one of Mozart’s most richly inventive and sublime early operas.  Most disappointingly, however, Hermann’s production is neither, and the scathing reviews are dead on.

Although Adam Fischer’s conducting of Mozart’s music is lucid, the Italian secco recitatives are disconcertingly replaced by monotonously tepid narration (supplied by two narrators).  Christoff Hetzer’s set design required 3d glasses for the premiere audience, which is a telling sign for what comes off like a first year art school student production that reduces transcendental mythology to inept, adolescent science fiction.  The Star Trek-looking Alban shepherds appear as badly white-wigged robots who break into frenzied, epileptic seizures as they sing their chorus to Venus.  Ascanio (Sonia Prina in bald wig) appears hopping across the stage in a sleeping bag and then gets plopped onto a stack of green, rubber gym mats (those mats reappear time and again for Ascanio to sort of dance with, on, and around).  The Alban shepherds reappear, minus face paint but now with Groucho Marx mustaches, what looks like diapers on their heads, and potted plants in their arms.  Diana Damrau is an all too brief, charming high point as Fauno on a swing.  Silvia (Marie-Belle Sandis), adorned in an embarrassingly ill-fitting ballerina outfit, is thrown into a wheel-barrel, and wheeled onto stage by her chaperone, Aceste (Charles Reid), who wears a fur jacket over a golfing sweater.  In equal opportunity fair play, Silvia gets her time on the pile of green gym mats and her chance for a spotlighted slaying in the spirit while the narrators repeatedly fall, get up, fall, get up—like children playing in a cowboys and Indians game.  The gym mats become mobile Lego sets, and the narrator finally puts on 3d glasses himself (in order to let the audience know that they need to follow suit?) The meeting of Ascanio and Silvia finally takes place on, you guessed it; a green gym mat.

Prina, Damrau, and Sandis are in excellent voice, making this infantile travesty all the more a tragically wasted opportunity.

For his Salzburg production, Claus Guth’s intertwines Mozart’s neglected, unfinished work with Adama (Earth in Hebrew), by 21st century Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin, commissioned especially for this project.  During Mozart’s brief lifetime, he worked with traditional forms and then, especially later in his career, defied those forms.  It is one of the great tragedies of music that Mozart did not live another ten to twenty years.  His late works (such as the Symphony in G minor ) saw Mozart at his most expansive and innovative.  To achieve a true Mozartean spirit, contemporary directors, when interpreting Mozart, should first and foremost forget that this is the work of “THE” Mozart.

Claus Guth’s Zaide is a profoundly imaginative interpretation that conveys the Mozartean essence in ways that are surprising, provocative, and unforgettable.  Guth’s staging of Zaide is one of relentless communication. Guth and Czernowin starkly tap the fleshy context of Zaide.  Czernowin’s doomed Romeo and Juliet/Israeli-Palestinian couple in modern day Israel parallel Zaide and Gometz.  The contemporary couple, simply named Woman and Man, also contrast Zaide, Gometz, and each other. Woman and Man do not communicate in the normal sense, but through consonants, grunts, and expressions. Yet, through their confused tongues, the two couples represent sharing amidst nightmarish repression.

Contrasting the two sets of couples are a tribe of men representing the status quo, adorned in business suits and over-sized, banal, masked heads. This tribe, who constitute both the hordes of the Sultan and the lords of the institutional dungeon, also struggle, immensely, in their attempts at communication, absurdly removing their masks then absurdly placing them back on their heads.   Zaide, Gometz, Man, and Woman, succeed in communicating, despite their difficulties. However, the Sultan and his tribe only  stumble in their attempts to be heard. Because of their power, the Sultan and his thugs are impotent. In frustration and desperation they predictably reach for their only recourse: violence in the stones for the stoning.

The sets, designed by Guth’s frequent collaborator, Christian Schmidt, are cast in a crystallized, barren viridian hue. The sets also emphasize contrasts: a normal size school desk is juxtaposed against a giant school desk, and a 4th dimension made up of projected video images enhance the tortured milieu.  Mozart’s music rises from the pit (Ivor Bolton conducting The Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra) while Czernowin’s contrasting atonal music is played on the stage (by Johannes Kalitzke conducting the Austrian Ensemble for New Music).  Both conductors and ensembles are inspired, rising to what had to be a considerable challenge.

Soprano coloratura Mojca Erdmann is captivating as a down to earth, bitingly angelic Zaide.  Topi Lehtipuu’s Gomatz is beguiling, tragically sensitive and yearning.  John Mark Ainsley’s Sultan, bloodied and stern, commands nothing less than complete attention as a great wall of rigidity, which Johan Reuter’s Allazim is unable to penetrate. Andreas Fischer repels as The Father (or rather, the symbolic Fatherland) who separates Woman and Man.  Noa Frenkel is simply amazing as Woman.  She expresses Czernowin’s jarring musical language with ease and perfectly compliments Yaron Windmueller’s equally compelling Man.  Their duets together linger vividly in the memory long after the finale, which left this viewer incoherently mumbling to himself as the applause and boos of the evening faded through the speakers.

Servant Leporello is waiting outside of Donna Annna’s house.  Anna is the daughter of the Commendatore.  Leporello’s masked master, Don Giovanni, has broken into the house to seduce Donna Anna.  However, Giovanni’s attempt is cut short when he’s confronted by the Commendatore.  A duel between the two men ends in the elder’s death. Anna does not know who the masked intruder was, but she makes Don Ottavio, her fiancee, swear revenge for the murder of the Commendatore.  Leporello and Giovanni move on to other conquests, namely Donna Elvira, who turns out to be one of Giovanni’s forgotten previous mistresses.  Barely evading the woman scorned (Elvira), Leporello and Giovanni move on to Zerlina.  Zerlina is engaged to Masetto, and Leporello is instructed to lure Masetto away.  Elvira, however, returns to level numerous accusations against Giovanni.  All of this is witnessed by Donna Anna, who now recognizes Giovanni as the voice of her father’s murderer.  Again, Anna passionately pleads with Ottavio to avenge her father.  At a masked ball, Giovanni attempts to rape Zerlina, but he is interrupted by the masked trio of Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, and Don Ottavio.  After a bit of cloak-and-dagger disguise (during which Giovanni attempts to seduce Elvira’s maid), Giovanni and Leporello are reunited in a cemetery.  There, they discover a statue of the slain Commendatore.  Giovanni, tongue-in-cheek, invites the statue to dinner.  The statue speaks and accepts Giovanni’s generous offer.  Leporello is, naturally, horrified.  The statue arrives for dinner and Giovanni, defiantly refusing to cower before the ominous specter, welcomes the guest.  The statue demands that Giovanni repent, but Giovanni repeatedly refuses. Finally, the statue of the Commendatore literally drags the unrepentant Giovanni to the gates of hell.  The various couples are left to start life anew.

Classic stagings of this dramatic favorite place it within the period and cast a Casanova-like spell over the narrative.  Martin Kusej’s Don Giovanni from the 2006 Salzburg festival is far removed from that era.  Indeed, at first glance, the feeling is one of having stumbled upon a setting out of a Stanley Kubrick movie.  Mobile white walls evoke a glacial, apocalyptic vacuum.

Kusej is not in sympathy with Giovanni, and he hammers that point with all the subtlety of a finale in hell.  The duel between the Commendatore and Giovanni is an assassination of an unarmed man. The Commendatore’s blood on the diaphanous white wall returns again and again and again.  Giovanni is a product of crass, contemporary superficiality.  Don Giovanni has been a staple role for baritone Thomas Hampson for nearly thirty years.  Hampson’s voice is certainly a tad more tattered now than it was in his youth, but this serves the still handsome actor quite well here, giving his Don an appropriate weariness.  Hampson is known for his acting skills and his total conviction in this conception of Giovanni is a captivating high point amidst mixed results. Giovanni, as interpreted by Kusej and Hampson, is an existential figure, self-serving, and devouring others to enhance his own masturbatory pleasures. The sterility of that point might be seen in Giovanni’s “Deh vieni.”  In the libretto, Giovanni serenades Elvira’s maid at the window with a mandolin, but here, it is a solitary experience with Giovanni singing it alone, to no one, as the stage gradually blackens. It’s a hauntingly subdued and memorable moment.

Commercial 21st century preoccupation with self-gratification and hollow sexuality is a not-so-subtle symbolic point, manifested by multiple appearances of nebulous, underwear clad glamor models (Kusej refers to them as Greek fertility goddesses).  They strike ludicrous poses, arduously scrub floors and mechanically apply their lipstick with disturbing results.  They reappear as flabby, old Wagnerian vamps (one step removed from joining George Romero’s dead), and finally, revived and young again as monotonous dominatrices.  Surprisingly, some critics  felt it necessary to point out that the parading of the models was not erotic in the least.  ( Other critics compared it to the famous Robert Palmer video).  The lack of eroticism seems to be an excruciatingly obvious intent.

At other points, characters periodically blindfold themselves, and each other, applying symbolic layer after symbolic layer after symbolic layer.

The interaction between Leporello and Giovanni at the imagined fantasy dinner is genuinely surprising and charming (earlier, their characters exchange recitatives). The Commendatore appears on an Orwellian screen in Hell as an arctic wasteland. Giovanni’s descent is a gradual, stone-cold hardening of the arteries. Giovanni’s life has been a masturbatory one (rape and murder being characteristics of that self-gratification) and this is equated with a finale of spiritual bankruptcy. On his path to damnation, Giovanni is finally dispatched by his servant, Leporello.  These are all substantial, interpretive points that heighten the composer’s contradictory, conflicting personality traits (the composer of Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte is also the composer of the “Great Mass in C minor”).

Christine Schafer is quite good as Donna Anna, capturing the impetuous charisma of the heroine.  Ildebrando D’Arcangelo is not as vocally suited to Leporello as he was to his unique, Mediterranean Figaro. Isabel Bayrakdarian’s buxom Zerlina , adorned in a tight, golden slip, is not only a scratched up, bruised victim to the Don, but, at one point she is even carried away by his army of listless mannequins.  Later, as she comforts her wounded lover Masetto (Luca Pisaroni) she very clearly discovers that the way to comfort him lies between his legs.  Malanie Diener as Donna Elvira is a considerable disappointment, both in her acting and singing.  Unfortunately, this production is even more seriously marred by Daniel Harding’s flaccid conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic.  Harding’s direction falls far short of the insight needed for such a conceptual-minded production.  Harding is clearly no Carlo Maria Giulini when it comes to his handling of Mozart’s sensationally expressive language.  Ultimately, this Giovanni belongs to Hampson and Kusej.

Claus Guth’s 2010 production starring Christopher Maltman as the Don and Erwin Schrott as Leporello is an even darker and superior production (Guth omits the traditional finale. Instead, the opera dramatically ends with Giovanni being cast into the netherworld, which is not as radical as it sounds since that was once a performance trend with this opera).  Unfortunately, Guth’s version also is deeply flawed by uninspired direction in the pit.  The first choice in a Giovanni DVD might still be Peter Sellars’ infamous nineties version, set in Harlem and cleverly featuring the Perry twins as Giovanni and Leporello.  Flaws aside, all of these titles are considerable, thoughtful, alternative productions.

FEATURING: Katy Haywood, Sheila Scullin, Will Oldham, Rich Schreiber, Ken Byrnes, Kathleen Kennedy, Ivan Dimitrov, Cory McAbee

PLOT: After her boyfriend goes missing a pregnant woman with dozens of sisters (all from

different mothers) enters a demolition derby against her Guatemalan father… and that’s just one of many plot lines running concurrently in this bizarre rural community.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Although a Guatemalan Handshake sounds like something you’d have to pay extra for at a massage parlor, it’s actually a strange little indie movie that takes the concept of ‘quirky and stretches it way past the breaking point.  Think what would happen if Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess had been hired to remake Gummo as a comedy and you’ll be somewhere in the stylistic neighborhood of this oddly conceived debut.

COMMENTS:  Though things sort themselves out in the end, there’s an excellent chance you’ll be totally lost within the first ten minutes of The Guatemalan Handshake.  The narrator, a spindly young girl named Turkeylegs, explains that her best friend, nerdy turtle-loving Donald, has gone missing, and introduces us to his father (who, like almost everyone else in town, doesn’t much care about his son’s disappearance) and his pregnant girlfriend Sadie, the daughter of a Guatemalan demolition-derby Lothario with dozens of (all-female) illegitimate children he drives around in a school bus.  While you’re still trying to wrap our minds around those details, all of which and more are delivered before the film’s title rolls, you see Donald’s last known appearance, watch a lapdog get electrocuted, and learn of a mysterious power failure whose aftermath is explained in spooky overlapping voiceovers.  More crazy characters appear, including a depressed older woman who wanders around in the background asking if anyone’s seen her missing dog, and Stool, a loser with a bowl haircut and a crustache who can’t hold down a job but nevertheless decides to romance Sadie.  And, as if Handshake‘s capriciously quirky characterizations and the way the story dips in and out of their lives weren’t disorienting enough, the film’s style also changes every few minutes.  Sequences are sped up, and we may suddenly find ourselves inside an unannounced flashback or watching an earnest freak-folk music video or taking in one of the many magical realist digressions, such as TV-personality Spank Williams’ unsuccessful public suicide or the tale of the woman who reads her own obituary in the morning paper.  Even dinner (which for Turkeylegs consists of a chocolate bunny filled with chocolate milk and covered in whipped cream) is an experiment in fast-cutting montage.  It’s winsome, it’s twee, and it annoyed the hell out of a lot of moviegoers who considered it pretentious hipster twaddle with no “real” characters; yet, it’s only fair to point out that all of the indie movie clichés Handshake displays are pushed so far that they become parody, and the film’s detractors may be missing part of the joke.  How seriously can we be intended to take a film that gives its characters with names like Turkeylegs, Stool, Ethel Firecracker and Donald Turnupseed?  Handshake works perfectly in its own conceptual stratosphere, but at ground level things sometimes falter: you can seldom relate to the bizarre characters, and the jokes are more awkward than funny.  And although the film is loosely tied together by the theme of loss—missing persons, lost dogs, and stolen cars—it doesn’t have much to say about its subject.  Handshake‘s only real passions are experimentation and eccentricity.  Whether that’s enough to carry the film is up to the viewer to judge.

The Guatemalan Handshake won the Slamdance special jury prize in 2006.  It didn’t receive theatrical distribution, but the DVD release was surprisingly elaborate: a two disc edition complete with commentary track, numerous behind the scenes features and six short films featuring Handshake‘s cast and crew.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“An understated, surrealist comedy that is more successful at being weird than funny, the film seeks to capture the ‘Napoleon Dynamite’-influenced tone of bizarre small-town quirkiness. It falls short of the mark, but not by much.”–Phil Villareal, Arizona Daily Star (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Funkadelic.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The opera was based off of Pierre Beaumarchais’ play (one of three Figaro plays), which had a well-earned reputation as subversive and revolutionary (Beaumarchais was also Voltaire’s publisher).  That Joseph II approved Da Ponte’s libretto was a little short of miraculous.  While the heavier political implications were removed from the text, the defiant, satirical tone ridiculing the aristocracy was, of course, the meat of the plot (the servants eventually best their autocratic master).  The opera, like the play, resonated with the masses. With that in mind, a non-revolutionary Figaro seems an oxymoron.

Over two hundred years later, The Marriage of Figaro remains an extraordinarily three dimensional work, which does not flinch from portraying deeply flawed characters. Numerous filmed versions of the opera have been released on DVD, but the 2006 Salzburg entry may be the most uncompromising to date.  There is, of course, Peter Sellars’ mid-nineties version (which, aptly, takes place in Trump Tower), but the line-up of the 2006 film should be a yield sign to opera fundamentalists.  The conductor, Nikolas Harnoncourt, has a well-earned reputation for “weirdness,” that possibly even surpasses the eccentric German music director Michael Gielen. Harnoncourt leads several of the M22 projects (more on those in later entries), but Le nozze di Figaro is the conductor at his most idiosyncratic and insightful.  Harnoncourt’s is not porcelain conducting here; he mirrors the disconcerting underside of Da Ponte’s libretto as interpreted by star director Claus Guth. Within a matter of seconds into the overture, Harnoncourt’s reveals an out-of-the-ordinary Figaro. Gone is the typical quicksilver effervescence. Instead, Harnoncourt’s seasoned pacing reinforces the nuanced poignancy, beauty, mature humor, and life-affirming drama of this music. Thankfully, Harnoncourt does not try to coat Mozart’s writing with a kind of Rossini whipped topping.

Oddly, the Romantics, more often than not, dismissed Mozart as one of those “powdered wig composers” and seemed oblivious to his remarkably progressive (and darker) works. While Figaro has comic elements, like Cosi Fan Tutti (the final and most complex of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas), it embraces every facet of human complexity.  If we dispense of preconceived notions and honestly approach Da Ponte’s libretto then the context, rather than the period content, of the opera prevails. Guth, Harnoncourt, Christian Schmidt (whose stage design is exemplary), a uniformly excellent cast, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the production team do just that.

Figaro is the personal attendant to Count Almaviva. Susanna is Fiagro’s fiancee and maid to the Countess Almaviva.  Figaro and Susanna are about to be married, but she is consumed with dread of the Count, who wants to revive his droit du seigneur privilege (a feudal lord’s right to sexually claim a vassal bride). The Count’s young page, Cherubino, simultaneously lusts after the Countess, Susanna, and the gardener’s daughter Barbarina. Together, Susanna, the Countess, Cherubino, Figaro, and a revolving host of characters conspire to thwart and outwit the Count’s amorous intentions.

It is Susanna and Cherubino who are the eyes of Figaro’s storm. Anna Netrebko (a bonafide opera sex symbol, but hardly an artistic lightweight) is an objectified, but conflicted, Susanna. She is pragmatic, determined, and, through sheer cunning, she attains her goal. The always interesting Christine Schafer is assurance personified as the shell-shocked spitfire, Cherubino (this male role is traditionally played by a female mezzo-soprano). He serves as an erotic sex toy for the women and a put-upon victim for his male rivals (they cut off chunks of the young lad’s hair, slice  his arm, and smear blood on his face). Both Netrebko and Schaffer resonate vividly in both their acting and singing. The men are nearly their equals. Bo Skovhus paradoxically evokes both repulsion and sympathy as the clammy Count Almaviva, who repeatedly finds dead ravens in the window sill. The Count is consumed with a Poe-like obsession for the servant he truly seems to love, yet cannot fully attain.  Ildebrando D’ Arcangelo’s gallant, mercurial Figaro scorches; he suggests neurotic impotence, yet never loses his admirable splendor. Figaro is the bastard son to Franz-Joseph Selig’s Dr. Bartolo and Marie McLaughlin’s Marcellina (who, initially, lusts after Figaro, unaware that he is her long-lost son: an Oedipal situation). Here, Bartolo is wheel-chair bound and pathetic.

Guth and company do not flinch from the libretto’s ruthless displays of erotic intrigue. The director also takes poetic liberties with the story: at the start Susanna and the Count are already engaged in an affair, and within minutes of the opening act, the Count drags Susanna into a closet for a wham, bam, thank you mam. Although the Count is secretly enforcing his privilege with Susanna, she is attracted to him while continuing to love and protect her sensitive Figaro. She wants to put an end to the Count’s sexual liberties with her, and her recourse lies with the Countess. This Figaro is comic in a Bergmanesque manner: the humor is birthed from contemplation. The strangest license taken with the libretto is an out-of-nowhere additional character, Cherubino’s angelic double, who sets the plot in motion, irritating, manipulating and advancing the dizzying range of agendas that unfold like chaotic lines in a diagram (which is literally displayed on a wall at the end of the third act). The libretto reveals the hunger of the characters. This is no vegetarian Figaro; its melancholic black and white sets, hauntingly deprived of furniture, echo the ominous decay of the cannibalistic aristocrat mindset.

Needless to say, when this Figaro was released, the opera fundamentalists were up in arms. “Psycho meets Mozart,” said one wit.  Another critic described the experience as “penance” and, naturally, numerous critics easily dismissed it as “pretentious.”  This Figaro is unsettling in an interior way, which is why some find it the most difficult, or dismissive of the M22 projects. Other operas from the 2006 Festival, while weirder on the sleeve, do not dismantle the museum-like appendage which has attached itself to Mozart’s operas, in the way this version of Figaro does. Overseas, however, numerous raves were also forthcoming: “an excitingly original production… a must for anyone who cares about Mozart,” said Time Out.  If you think comic book fans are a tad overzealous about filmed approaches to their tights-wearing heroes, then a quick glance at reactions from many American opera fans to contemporary opera stagings reveals that those Marvel fanboys are a subdued lot. American fans tend to approach opera the way some fundamentalist Christians approach the Good Book, insisting on a face value, inerrant interpretation—the King James Version.  So insistent on orthodox and/or period staging are such fans that their first line of attack against an imaginative staging is to spew tiresome venom and tag it with the oh-so-predictable label of “EURO-TRASH.”  The idea, for those so inclined, is to keep the composer locked in his or her own boxed time, shut him off to new generations, fresh interpretations, and put an institutional sheen over the work, turning it into a museum piece, rather than breathing theater.  It is no accident that opera in Europe is far bigger and better attended and supported than it is here, where its worshippers make a false, bourgeois religion out of the art form (in kind of the way smooth jazz has killed jazz).

This obviously should not be an introductory Figaro for traditionalists.  Nor should the 2009 Dutch Figaro, which features the resplendent Danielle de Niese as Susanna and is imaginatively set, by directors Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, inside a car showroom (it is actually not as ill-fitting or wacky as it sounds and really is charming). For those who simply cannot rise to the challenge, then two equally strong recommendations should suffice for a comfortable safety net: Oliver Mille’s 1994 version with Alison Hagley as Susanna (Hagley may be the quintessential Susanna on film) highlighted by Constanze Backes’ memorable rendition of “Barbarina’s cavatina” (an example of Mozart’s ability to take a simple song, about a lost pin, and turn into sublime poetry). However Bryan Terfel’s Figaro seems puppy dog cute when compared to D’ Arcangelo’s.  The more recent 2008 Figaro by David McVicar featuring Miah Persson as Susanna has already become almost a universal favorite.  Guth’s Figaro, however, restores the provocative sense of danger to Mozart’s greatest opera. It is a memorable, welcome, profoundly liberating, shattering and potent alternative in an over-crowded field of staid productions.

FEATURING: Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood

PLOT: An apprentice perfumer in pre-Revolutionary France sets out to make the perfect scent,

a task that requires him to murder thirteen beautiful virgins.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Although its choice of protagonist—an orphaned serial killer with a superhuman sense of smell—certainly proves that Perfume is out of the ordinary, it’s mostly just a period drama punctuated by bursts of black humor, with most of its weirdness concentrated in the orgiastic finale.

COMMENTS: Adapted from Patrick Süskind’s novel of the same name, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer feels like a lavish epic as it traverses 18th century France, stopping to sniff out every scent (good or bad) along the way. German director Tykwer (of Run Lola Run fame) shows us the urban squalor of Paris, the expansive majesty of the countryside, and the perfume mecca of Grasse through the eyes and nose of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Whishaw), our amoral and barely verbal anti-hero.

With his unsurpassed olfactory prowess, Grenouille wonders at all the scents in the world, yet is perpetually enraged: he can’t capture them all, and he lacks a personal scent. As far as his nose is concerned, he’s a cipher, a nonentity. His response to these inner crises is to study the secret art of perfuming under the tutelage of the self-absorbed Baldini (Hoffman), then migrate to Grasse, where he hatches his elaborate, murderous master plan.

This plan forms the centerpiece of the film, as Grenouille kidnaps and kills Grasse’s young maidens one after another, distilling their scents through the technique of enfleurage. Perfume spares little sentiment for the victims, focusing instead on how their deaths contribute to Grenouille’s angelic-smelling magnum opus. The film even juxtaposes Grenouille’s reign of terror with the authorities’ botched investigation in a blackly comic montage, all the better to highlight its anti-hero’s messianic, above-the-law status.

Like any rogue with a rise-and-fall character arc, Grenouille eventually gets arrested and tortured.  But after his solemn march to the town square for crucifixion, Perfume loses all resemblance to other crime thrillers past or present and begins to look like an excerpt from Ken Russell‘s richest, most elegant fantasies. I won’t give away the climactic twist, except to say that it indulges all of the film’s wildest, most spectacular urges.  By the time a drop of perfume falls on a Paris street in the last shot, there’s little for the viewer to do but gape at Tykwer’s mad bravado.

The rest of Perfume isn’t quite so magnificently over-the-top, but Tykwer complements Grenouille’s obsessions by zeroing in on one sensuous piece of period detail after another, all in a futile but nonetheless impressive attempt to visually capture scent. And although Whishaw dominates much of the film, the supporting cast occasionally steals the show: Hoffman provides tragicomic relief as a desperate has-been; Rickman brings his laconic grace to the role of a Grasse nobleman and overprotective father; and John Hurt’s mordant narration frames the whole endeavor as a bleak fairy tale.

Perhaps the greatest irony about Perfume is that although it was a massive, expensive undertaking, it still feels cultish and off the beaten path. It’s so morbid, thorny, and perversely funny that it’s hard to believe it could ever have much mainstream appeal. But imagine sniffing the fumes that would rise if you blended a picaresque costume drama with a slasher movie, then heaped on a thick broth of style.  That, more or less, is Perfume.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a tale whose off-the-charts screwiness obscures virtually all shortcomings.”–Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness