Johanna

Is Opera for you? If so, Johanna is rather more than opera transferred to the screen. New opera is incredibly expensive to produce – costs might run close to a million, yet tickets cost more than a trip to the cinema – and many people prefer to see well-known operas rather than new works. So can cinema be an outlet for emerging operatic talent? And does it work as cinema? Johanna is a reworking of the story of Joan of Arc. In this modern 'version', she is a patient in a Budapest hospital and also turns out to be a drug addict. Having saved her from a terrible road accident, the staff realise she has nowhere to go, but a young doctor is attracted to her and persuades the hospital to keep her on as a nurse if he trains her up. Soon she is performing miraculous cures – achieved largely it seems by having sex with the male patients. They recognise her saintly healing gifts but also brand her a whore. She says she does what she does, sacrificing her body, to save others out of pure love. The doctor suitor says he loves her and she should love only him; but she retorts that he does not know what love is.

From a cinematic point of view, an immediate advantage of opera is that we do not complain about plot holes or lack of realism – that is not unusual in opera – if it makes conceptual or symbolic sense that is usually enough. A downside is that, even in the best of auditoriums, the purity of the sound quality does not quite equal that of an opera house. So how do we justify the transition to the screen? Is the spirit of the opera better conveyed? Polanski's transition from Shakespeare's theatre, for instance, evokes a realism, the sense of mud and filth in a rain-sodden Scottish countryside, that would be impossible on stage. The opening scenes of Johanna look promising: the dark and eerie setting of the old-fashioned hospital, the ghostly pallor of the patients in the dismal setting. But soon it becomes clear that the lack of visual lustre is more about budget than choice. Most filmmakers, for instance, would have given visual emphasis to her first hit of morphine as she embraces the drug, but we are left to imagine her inner exhilaration as we would have to if it were a stage opera. Subtitles are also low quality and not always easy to read. Where the film really comes into its own however is when the revelation of Johanna's divine mission becomes clear, amidst contrasting scenes of light and dark. We recall the large amounts of exposed breasts earlier in the film that lead to the doctor's infatuation – an obsession romanticised into 'love' and full of jealousy and moral self-righteousness. The tragedy of divine goodness hiding within the lowliest form gains momentum and – as in all good operas – proceeds to its inevitable climax.

By the end of the film, the forces of good and evil have become strongly polarised, the 'good' doctors sing of how they will 'praise' her (once she is out of their way). The rebuffed doctor arms himself with two needles (like the arms of a cross – is he going to drug-rape her? kill her? frighten her?) - he becomes symbolic of the Christian Church that controls the eros within its faithful by worship of abstinence and conjugal rights; just as she becomes symbolic of true love to all mankind, philia, to which her sexuality becomes subservient.

The remarkable thing about Johanna, a new experimental opera written directly for the screen Zsofia Taller, is that it works at all. As an opera it works brilliantly. As a film, it just about proves its point.

Sat through about what seemed like 20 minutes of this attempt at art, though it may have been in fact only 8-12 minutes.

I don't know what sort of cameras they shot this with, but as presented at the 2005 Saint Louis Internation Film Festival, the picture had such visible digital compression artifacts that I wished it had been shot with antique analog video camera instead of whatever they used. Then at least the blown-out whites would have had some interesting flange and flare.

Sound, similarly, was digitally compromised, or at least had unintended sounds bumping in. The singers were competent, but the music itself was over-composed.

I'm not writing a review. More of a warning: You're going to have to love the concept, I think, to sit through this production.

I suggest to the authors that they load up a web-server with it, treat it as a storyboard for a real production, and see if anyone bites on it.

It's just not ready for putting people in the seats to experience it, and this is from one who loved J. Caouette's "Tarnation".

A pretentious eccentricity: a virtually unrecognizable modernization of the Joan Of Arc tale (with the heroine now a drug addict-turned-nurse-turned-whorish miracle maker!) which, of all things, is also an opera sung in Hungarian! I only included it in the “Epic” challenge for this reason and had, in fact, intended to watch Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC as part of a marathon to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his death…but had to abandon the whole idea and, in the process, considerably streamline the schedule for the rest of the month following an unexpected death in the family which turned into a national tragedy!

Incidentally, Roberto Rossellini had already made a film out of Arthur Honnegger’s opera JOAN OF ARC AT THE STAKE (1954; which has, thankfully, just been released as a SE DVD in Italy) featuring the director’s then-wife Ingrid Bergman; I haven’t watched this yet but did recently acquire the latter’s earlier 1948 film about the famous inspirational but misunderstood warrior-saint. The film under review, then, is original to be sure and mercifully short – but also rather pointless...to say nothing of dismal-looking, dreary and thoroughly depressing! Having said that, some of the music – particularly the children’s choruses – is quite pleasing, though...

People walked out of the theatre..fair enough. It's an Art film and an extremely audacious one to boot. But in my humble opinion, it's not worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

If you can get past the fact that 1) it's an opera, 2) it's sung (very beautifully) in Hungarian, and 3)there's naked old men singing about liver failure..you might actually enjoy this film. If not then perhaps you might find that you can appreciate it as a one off. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, I suppose is up to the viewer.

The lead actress Orsi Toth is absolutely stunning in this film. Her performance was uncomfortable, emotive, and surprising. I look forward to seeing her in future films.

This does fall into the art film category, and of course art films are not all good and taste varies. I tend to put art films towards the right part of the spectrum, meaning the "good" part so to speak. This one however I must place at the left extreme of the spectrum along with trash such as what you might expect from a film titled something like "Jesse James Meets Terry and the Pirates" (just made that up). The lines are all sung (kind of) like in lulls in between arias of an opera, only there are no arias. Just the same sound over and over and over. There is a certain arty ugliness to this hospital, so ugly that I thought the film would redeem itself if I sit there long enough and not give up. What is the story like? Since my review is directed at those who have not seen it yet, I will just be metaphoric. Think of being swallowed by a huge pig. You get bitten up in the mouth, gulped down the esophagus, churned around in the stomach, reduced to mash in the intestines, and whatever is left gets dumped out his rear end. Halfway into this you are convinced that there is some good to all this ugliness, though we know the world for some of us (many of us?) is a bad place and we wind up in the burn pile. That's the story, and I don't think my metaphor has spoiled anything. If after reading the other reviews you must see it, then I suggest you spend as little as possible of your hard-earned money and watch for say 10 minutes or so. If you like it by then, enjoy the rest, but if not --- it won't get better. The one thing I got out of it all, particularly after reading its history and the other reviews, is the realization more than ever before that there are those who laud something as art for having been placed into the art category. I don't know if my review will do anyone any good. Very few who read the review titled awful considered that review helpful, so I wrote a longer review. I like to write helpful reviews. If you do see it and find it awful, you might give us nay-sayers a thumbs up to give us credibility, which may prompt others to watch something else instead. Having read the reviews for this film, I had expectation of a worthwhile art film, but found in my honest opinion a monstrosity, all 82 minutes of it. Oh, and I almost forgot. Sex is suggested more than actual. What little nudity there is is rather ugly. It is a hospital after all.