Le maître de musique

Belgium's nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar of 1988 is an elegant highbrow crowd pleaser, in which music scores by Verdi, Mahler, Mozart et al get top billing over the actors, and not without good reason. World-renowned baritone Jose van Dam stars as a (surprise) world-renowned baritone, who for reasons never fully explained abruptly retires to train aspiring soprano Anne Roussel and (again for unclear reasons) a common thief with a raw singing talent. But what begins as a polite, continental variation of 'Pygmalion', with all the usual trappings of a turn-of-the-century period piece, works up considerable steam when, unknown to van Dam, his arch enemy Prince Scotti begins training his own protégé, hoping to match him against his rival's two pupils in a no-holds-barred aria duel (to the death?) It's a thrilling (if slightly ridiculous) climax, and goes a long way toward compensating for some of the film's earlier, nagging deficiencies. If for no one else, this is a must for classical music aficionados.

As a dark horse, this Belgian film surprisingly got an Oscar nomination for BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM in 2009, directed by Gerard Corbiau, whom maybe we feel more familiar with for his later work FARINELLI (1994), another music-related opus, with a more dramatic pathos within.

Ominously the music itself steals the thunder of the film per se, which leaves it in an awkward position, where only genuine opera lovers could rigorously indulge themselves with it while for laypeople like me, the waning correlation is unavoidable and discouraging.

The film stars a real maestro José van Dam (the celebrated Belgian bass-baritone) as a singer, who is compelled to retire in his middle-age by his arch enemy, the Duke, with the help of his loyal wife, he trains two disciples and finally get his vengeance over the Duke. However Mr. van Dam's stiff performance could not be excused as a stark novice stage-fright; two young leads Anne Roussel and Philippe Volter also fail to be impressive apart from their singing parts. By contrast, only Sylvie Fennec and Patrick Bauchau deliver some sincere acting skills without too much superficial showing-off.

The setting, costume and all its delicate props are in their right places to exude a bourgeois sentiment which casually goes well with the film's uneventful narrative. The final showdown is a fleeting opera duel between two respective disciples from the maestro and the Duke. The mask tableau is a major attraction, too bad it just ends like that, without too much aftertaste.

After all, one cannot complain more about this film as long as music save us all from this molecularly mundane world.

The kind of film that earns "European films" the bad rap and bad rep the get from a lot of people these days. I had the feeling the film was written to showcase the music, not vice versa. And since you can't write a terribly compelling film about training vocalists, we're trapped into watching seemingly endless camera pans of trees, birds in them chirping ad nauseum, pseudo-profound, meaningful stares between people who have nothing to say to each other, and a Mahler symphony on the sound track that just simply won't go away. A terribly tedious film.

It is a rare feat to have a movie plot and music so complementary and interwoven. Great actors. Outstanding choice of music pieces. Great performers. It is difficult not to be fascinated by this movie. A must see and see again. Mahler's lieders will become forever unforgettable.

Yet the back of the box that this videotape came in actually describes this film as such a cross: "Amadeus" meets "Rocky". That in itself should have been a pretty big warning.

The film revolves around the retirement of an opera star, Joachim Dallayrac, and his retreat into seclusion to train two young pupils, Sophie and Jean. The former is a great admirer of his work; the latter is a petty thief whom Dallayrac sees promise in.

Most of the movie simply focuses on the training of the youngsters, which is mostly just shots of them singing while Dallayrac watches. There's nothing very fresh about these scenes, and the writing is weak overall. Quotes Dallayrac's companion Estelle, when Sophie arrives at the house: "He's going to end up loving you," and so it's no surprise when he does, and then she loves him too, but then he wants her to focus on her work, and she gets upset, and ends up falling for Jean, who has already fallen for her. It's a recycled plot, to say the least.

The best characters in the film are the bad guys, Prince Scotti, his attendant, and his pupil Arcas, the former two of which strut around like Bond villains and deliver their lines in similar fashion: Scotti, upon first meeting Jean, asks if Dallayrac has told Jean about him, and then utters the immortal lines: "Je suis le prince. Le prince Scotti." ("I am the prince. Prince Scotti.") It actually comes out funnier in French (to me, anyway), but the sad part is that in any event I don't think it was intended to make me laugh out loud.

Scotti has put on a competition that ends up being between Dallayrac's pupils and his own, and since Sophie and Jean are the good guys it comes as no surprise to anyone when they win the day.

The cinematography is good, at least, and the actors do what they can with what they've been given, but the sentimentality inherent in the premise is milked for all it's worth and then some. Sophie's performance and the vocal duel between Jean and Arcas near the end are pretty much the only highlights in what is otherwise a rather flat picture.

If you're not a fan of opera, you're better off skipping this movie. If you are a big fan of opera, you might as well give it a watch, but you're probably better off actually going to the opera, where it's a lot harder to get rehashed ideas like this one greenlighted. (C)