Fédora

This is originally a stage play by Victorien Sardou, a French 19th century dramatist who among other plays wrote the "Tosca" story, famour for the opera by Puccini. Also Fedora was made an opera by Umberto Giordano, another veristic opera composer at the time. This dramatic story is about the bad mixture of love and politics. The beautiful princess Fedora of Russia is going to marry a prince of the top society, when he gets assassinated. She swears to avenge his death, and later on in Paris in the high society there of Russian aristocrats she meets a young talented painter (Amedeo Nazzari) who paints her, and they fall in love. What she doesn't know is that his family is Russian and persecuted by the authorities as political dissidents, and he doesn't know that she is responsible for their persecution, following her oath of revenge. It is all very melodramatic and operatic, but it is a beautiful film with sumptuous costumes and sets, and the film is a feast for the eyes of opera lovers, for it is actually an opera. The music of the film is namely by Umberto Giordano, who was 75 when he wrote this film music, and it's the music that makes the film interesting, as it sustains the action, the emotions, the temperaments, the changing moods and dramatic changes of action and actually appears as the lead of the film, with the actors as puppets. Luisa Ferida as Fedora is not very beauttful but rather like a costume doll, and Amedeo Nazzari as the lover is like a combination of Errol Flynn and Peter Ustinov - he resembles both of them at times. Annibale Betrone as the old ailing composer Boroff is perhaps the most interesting character, maybe something of a self portrait of the old Giordano; while everything else in this film is purely operatic, recalling "La traviata" above all and many other Italian operas. That's the curiosity of this fim: it is opera made as a film, but although it is just a film it is the music that makes it.