Farinelli

Farinelli is not nearly as awful as I feared it would be. It's similar in many ways to Amadeus. Like Amadeus, it has glorious music beautifully performed. Like Amadeus, it tells a good (if melodramatic) story. Like Amadeus, it has a marvelous period feel. Like Amadeus, the characters in this story have the names and occupations of real people, but their portrayal on the screen is not even caricature: a caricature necessarily starts with something recognizeable.

Farinelli was famous in history not merely for a phenomenal voice and outstanding musicianship and musical connoisseurship, but for poise, dignity, and perfect-pitch judgement of human character; he is portrayed throughout as a hysteric. Handel is shown as a pompous, bullying nervous wreck verging on the psychotic, quite at variance with all reliable accounts of his humor, sturdiness, practicality, and reputation for scrupulous probity toward his musicians and singers.

Handel could not have said, to Farinelli, during the latter's first sensational season with the Opera of the Nobility, that he would never write another opera, and not just because Handel was no faux-Freudian opera queen: Lady History inconveniently discloses that after that 1733-34 season Handel composed and presented Ariodante, Alcina, Atalanta, Giustino, Arminio, Berenice, Faramondo, Serse, and Imeneo; his last opera, Deidamia, went unperformed, but several in that list were significant successes, and some were revived more than once.

The two rival opera companies in London went down the drain more or less simultaneously, notwithstanding the enormous draw of Farinelli for the Nobility company, and notwithstanding the high quality of the music of its principal composers (Porpora, Hasse, undervalued today) and the stupendous quality of Handel's music (also undervalued); rather, the people with the money to afford the (by our standards) enormous ticket prices had simply lost interest.

One commentator here is skeptical about many "period" details. And rightly: for starters, that's not the way boys were castrated, but you don't need to know the truth. Relax, just enjoy the music and the costumes and the actors chewing the scenery.

I think some long periods of Farinelli's life are left out. The film is too focused on his love life, making it definitely a female movie. There were a lot of other aspects to explore. We also get to see the obligatory scenes of audiences being mesmerized by opera, as if they were some island natives and not opera house regulars. Nevertheless, being a high budget movie, it has great costumes and beautiful scenery. Most of all you get the chance to explore the divine music of Haendel.

This remarkable film remains one of my favourites. The story line at first left me wondering why the director had chosen to make the film in the first place. Luscious scenery, beautiful costumes, sets, extravagant, but historically accurate stagings for the opera scenes, great language and dialogue - but why make a film about an all but forgotten singer from almost three centuries ago? Nothing in the film seemed to give a clue as to why anyone would go to all the bother of reconstructing a marvelous voice so painstakingly, and choose one of the great performers of our time to oversee the performances of the music. Repeated viewings did not seem to throw any light on the vexing question that, despite all the lushness and splendour I was still missing some point to the whole exercise. It was only on the third or fourth viewing that I noticed in the opening credits a small remark - in French - "to the memory of my daughter . . "name"". Suddenly the whole thing made sense. This marvelous and true story of the castrato is, perhaps, the directors attempt to describe his impotence in the face of the loss of his beloved child. Viewed in this light the ending of the film and the sequences in London between Farinelli and Benedict finally begin to have a poignancy and a sadness that is truly stunningly and sensitively achieved whilst adding to the story line. I love this film and cannot possibly recommend it enough. Any lover of Early Music should revel in it, but it has been lifted out of the ordinary and into the universal and sublime by that one small realization. Superlatives cannot do it justice.

Visually and sound-wise this is a beautiful film that can be recommended. The flash-backs when Ricardo looks back on childhood are good, showing the tight links between the two brothers. But, one is waiting through the whole film for the continuation of the early scene where Carlo (Farinelli) does not try to prevent the soldiers from taking Ricardo away by force. There is too much focus on the brothers' conquests and maybe too little on the singing. But the songs that we hear are beautiful and when one knows the amount of work that has been put into the reconstruction of Farinelli's unique voice (covering one octave more than any singer alive today) one should probably not complain.

I know I'm being sort of anal by mentioning this, but this movie, as beautiful and enchanting as it is, has many inaccuracies.

Farinelli, in addition to his handsome features and heavenly voice, was also a very humble person and hardly displayed the raucous behavior of a "rock star" as depicted in the film.

Second, the singer was known as disinterested in sex, thus I have no idea why the sex scenes in the film were included. True, there WERE castrati who did engage in pleasures of the flesh, but Farinelli was NOT one of them, or at least there are no historical records suggesting so.

All that aside, this movie was a lavishly done production and a must-see!