Madame Butterfly theatre review

The opera.  It is an interesting art form.  In this day and age, film is king of the entertainment world and subtlety the hallmark of award-winning acting.  Where does opera fit in?  It is a heightened art form, typically involving high stakes scenarios and free-wheeling emotions.  For a singer to perform such challenging music requires great body energy, so how does that marry with a naturalistic approach to acting?  In many ways it doesn't, and the viewer is asked to accept certain limitations in staging and performance.  A clever production, though, will cater to these requirements and present them in a way that they do not appear limiting at all.  This was one such production.

I have been regularly attending the opera for several years now, and it has taken me all this time to adjust to many of its conventions.  NZ Opera's new production of Madame Butterfly, then, surprised me with its restraint.  It is an undeniably beautiful production, and its set is versatile as well as structurally rather simple.  The costumes are classic colonial dress, and many floral kimonos.  These look good and provide a rather basic platform that informs time and place, but only serves the story and never overshadows it.

The cast achieve a balance between nuanced character work and heightened dramatic choices that fits neatly in between the worlds of filmic realism and melodrama.  Similarly, the set is at once suitably bold and visually arresting, and maintains the appearance of a practical, believable dwelling.

Overall, this is a smart, simple production of a beloved story that is not fussy or elaborate and fixes our attention on the story and our title character.  She and the core cast embrace a sometimes naturalistic style of acting, with the moments of histrionics reserved for the most dramatic moments.  This production achieves a style that felt true to historical conventions of opera and simultaneously caters to a modern audience. Exquisite.

See this production if you enjoy operatic music and are ready to witness one woman's heart-breaking wrestle with love.

Performance (A Late Quartet) film review

A film about musicians, and the choices they make when putting art first.  I'm a sucker for these sorts of films.  I recognise the lives of artists more than I do the lives of vampires or action heroes in a dystopian future.  So too would artistically celebrated film actors identify closely with these roles, and this makes for some exceptionally refined performances from indie favourites Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener.  Rounding out the core cast are Mark Ivanir and Imogen Poots, both of whom deliver enjoyable performances, though they lack the gravitas that gives their co-stars' performances such power.

I have never really felt much for Walken before.  Till now, I've considered his major talent to be the shamelessness with which he unites sardonic humour and sartorial failure.  Here, he upholds his reputation for being the worst dressed baller on the block, but the cynical clown is nowhere to be seen.  Here, Walken gives the film its heart and provides its most touching moments.  He plays a respected musician facing the  end of his career and coming to terms with what that means for the future.

The storylines of the other characters are best viewed as subplots.  There is an element of soap opera to their sexual escapades and Walken's story remained the most interesting for its specificity to his vocation, and how it is affected as he battles both his mortality and his dedication to artistic integrity.

From this I was reminded of the TV series Smash.  It purports to be a behind-the-scenes look at how a Broadway musical comes together.  In execution, though, it is often little more than a soap opera with the occasional song thrown into the mix.  It has moments of brilliance, though, and when these occur it is alway within a storyline that focuses on the particular struggles that face Broadway luminati.  When we see their artistic struggles affect their personal lives, we care.  When we see their arbitrary whims affect their personal lives, we care less.

Similarly, in Performance, I cared more about some events than others.  For the most part, this film does tie its conflicts to the struggle artists face about whether to prioritise their personal relationships or their vocational aspirations.  The problem is mostly that the outworking of these struggles often feels contrived or simplistic.  However, Keener and Hoffman do a remarkable job of embodying these characters and I found myself engrossed in their story.

Overall, the film is a rather light examination of some really interesting issues.  It's enjoyable from start to finish, but achieves less emotional impact than it was probably aiming for.  Walken, though, made me bawl.

See this film if you have artistic inclinations and would like to see how that might screw up your life.

Cloud 9 theatre review

For some years now, I have been under the impression that Caryl Churchill was an all too serious playwright with an axe to grind and a general disdain for society.  I don't know where I got any of that from, but I've been avoiding her plays for years and now I feel quite the fool for so doing.  Cloud 9 was a joyous romp that touches on issues that may or may not be deemed serious and important.  If anything, her deft portrayal of contrasting viewpoints highlights the fact that importance is subjective.

Sam Shore's production for Good Company is extremely stylish.  The set is at once simple, functional, and interesting, while the period costumes hold up well to close inspection (I was in the front row).  I felt, though, more could have been done to establish the timeframe of Act II.  The costumes could have belonged to any period in the last 30 years - except for Cathy's dress, which would have looked out of place at any time in the last 30 years.  Each costume, though, is very well suited to the character - except perhaps Cathy's dress, which only suited the character in so far as both she and her costume were extremely difficult to bear.  As if bratty children are not annoying at the best of times, a poorly acted bratty child is tiresome indeed.  David Capstick certainly showed less affinity with this role than his chauvinistic master of the house whose antics I rather enjoyed in Act I.

Each actor in Cloud 9 portrays two characters, and I felt that most of the actors were a lot more at home with one of their characters than the other.  Some were stronger in Act I, others in Act II.  Special credit, then, must go to Joel Herbert, Steven Anthony Maxwell and Francis Mountjoy, who were each at the top of their games from start to finish.  In particular, I enjoyed Maxwell's gift for comedy and Herbert's extraordinary quality of being awkwardly suave.  Donogh Rees and Renee Lyons were rather good in Act I, but were both so outstanding in Act II that I struggled to reconcile that they were the same actors.

It turns out that Cloud 9 is not such a confronting play at all.  Churchill does face the challenges of sexual identity with an honesty that may have been bold at the time of the first production, but now seems so commonplace that one could appreciate the play as a rather frivolous comedy.  I know I appreciated the humour more than any other aspect.

I haven't even mentioned the music yet!  Several scenes were underscored by piano and/or strings.  This was handled with great panache and elevated the overall tone to make it something quite refined.  I was less taken with the songs the cast sang to punctuate the play's start and end, but they certainly detracted nothing from this fine production.

See this play if you want a good night out.  The production is slick, and the play is hilarious.

Trance film review

I hope Christopher Nolan was taking notes while watching Trance; this is how you make a film that flips between past and present, reality and the imaginary.  As I watched Trance I could not help but think that Danny Boyle could have made Inception a brilliant film (it so very nearly was...except it was stupid).  Evidently, I have not yet forgiven Nolan for wasting those hours of my life.  Trance, though, offers some great lessons on how to move on with one's life, so it is likely I will very soon be cured.

Although it starts out masquerading as a heist film, it soon becomes clear that the real story is much more personal - and has probably largely already taken place.  The wonderful thing about Boyle's storytelling is that he really keeps you guessing.  He drops clues just often enough to keep you wanting more, but it is a long time before the truth is actually revealed.  It takes a master to maintain suspense as long as he does, and he uses a variety of methods - often more sophisticated than the incidental music soap operas have claimed as their own, but sometimes as simple as a tap left running off-screen.

All this suspense may sound excruciating to some.  And well it would be if the only mystery to unravel were the whereabouts of a certain bounty.  But as the tale progresses we witness some twisted and intriguing behaviour between characters that we cannot help but wonder about their shared histories.  And explaining the true nature of the relationships amongst our motley crew becomes the real mystery we wish to uncover.

Add to all of this some Boyle's signature colour-rich aesthetic, some unexpected violence and some rather creatively justified nudity and hey presto, we have a blockbuster.

Fine performances all round, but this film relies mostly on its carefully crafted and carefully revealed plot.  I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.

See this film if you need a supplement of the sublime to get you through, as we continue the excruciating wait till the next Kaufman film. 

Rust and Bone film review

A knockout of a film.  10/10.  Rust and Bone delivers outstanding originality in its subject matter, its narrative arc and its visual style.  I enjoy a film that keeps me guessing.  And in this case, I was on the edge of my seat throughout as even the most mundane scenarios were given surprising weight and handled with supreme delicacy by stars Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts.  Oh Schoenaerts.  His name may seem difficult to pronounce now, but we'll all know it before long.  It takes a bright star to maintain shininess beside Cotillard, and this guy is equal to the task.  He is very shiny indeed.

The great skill of this film is to endear the viewer so surely to characters of such low social standing.  It does not do so in the way that Wes Anderson or Guy Ritchie might, but rather lures us in with the artlessness of those striving to inch forward to a step and half ahead of death, but not at the expense of enjoying every moment.  There's a brutal honesty to these lives that beguiles.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film's style is that it repeatedly shies away from showing key events, and instead focuses on the emotional fallout relating to them.  I have seen this technique attempted before, without success.  The danger can be that the viewer loses emotional attachment without seeing a character's struggle/victory.  The reason it works in this case is that the struggles/victories associated with life changing events are in what happens after.  And without getting bogged down by the details of physical struggle, more time is afforded to focus on the emotional struggles.

I find this tremendously rewarding to watch, as I imagine our actors did to enact.  The material is profoundly rich.

I don't want to give anything else away, but I wish everybody would see this film.  The only possible thing that could have enriched the experience for me is if the film had been named The Streetfighter and the Cyborg.  I imagine that it's only a matter of time before we have an English-language adaptation that does just that for the American market.

See this film if you can handle subtitles and want to discover a brand new talent in Matthias Schoenaerts.  Be prepared for something mighty.  Allow yourself time afterwards to ponder the bigger questions in life.