To Die For

 To Die For is a raunchy neo-noir in which a femme fatale schemes to further her career by plotting the murder of her husband.  In classic noir, the characters would possess a certain charisma and elegance.  This is not the case in Gus van Sandt's 1995 To Die For.  The deadly black widow is a dim-witted weather girl on a cable access Tv station in rural New Hampshire.  Her husband is a similarly dull Italian stud, resolutely middle-class, whose family owns a popular Italian restaurant.  The hit man enlisted in the murder plot is an ignorant metal rock headbanger who is flunking out of high school -- he fancies himself as a romantic hero, but his wimpy high school teacher sadistically humiliates him, cuffing him in the face without any consequences.  The hit man's buddies form a ne-er do well trio with him: they are another headbanger who is like Butthead on the well-known TV show and a chubby girl who pathetically thinks that the others in the movie, including the glamorous weather-girl, are actually her friends -- in fact, they have nothing but contempt for her and betray her confidences (as does she as well) at the first opportunity.  This is all bargain-basement noir -- instead of Fred MacMurray you get Joaquin Phoenix mumbling and stumbling around in one of his first roles with the other sad sacks in the cast.  Successful films are built, often, on a disjunction or disconnect and this is the case with To Die For:  the dissonant element in this squalid film noir parody is Nicole Kidman as the scheming weather girl, Suzanne Stone.  Although she's playing a character with aspirations far beyond her rather meager grasp, Suzanne Stone is radiantly beautiful and seductive -- she elevates the film's low life milieu into the realm of classic film noir, playing an evil heroine who can compete with Barbara Stanwyck or Veronica Lake.  Kidman delivers a hypnotic performance that is riveting and intensely erotic.  She exudes cool, technically sophisticated sexual technique deployed with complete heartlessness -- this is dramatically contrasted with the one moment in the film in which we see her unmasked and without artifice, a memorable sequence in which, hearing the song "Sweet Home Alabama", she dances in the headlights of her punk boyfriend's car:  the camera falls in love with her and so does the audience.  

Suzanne Stone is ambitious and aims to become a TV news journalist, although she has no real talent and isn't too smart.  She's married to a hapless Italian stallion husband, a pretty boy who is all looks but with nothing much underlying his handsome features -- he's played sullenly by Matt Dillon.  His wife finagles her way into a very low-rent cable access TV show where she pesters her bosses into letting her do the local weather (she makes it into a big melodramatic spectacle) and, also, aspires to produce a documentary on local disenfranchised and alienated youth.  It's through her documentary efforts that she encounters the derelict trio of teenagers, Lydia, Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix) and Russell (Casey Affleck); they are hopelessly inarticulate and miserable subjects for the documentary.  More out of boredom than anything else, Suzanne seduces Jimmy and starts a torrid sexual affair with him. When her traditional Catholic husband Larry demands that she stay home and act the part of a housewife, Suzanne persuades Jimmy to murder her husband.  There's a gun that Lydia has kept to deter her mother's boyfriend from sexually molesting her and the trio break into Larry's house and shoot him dead.  They leave a trail that is ludicrously easy to follow and the cops immediately arrest Jimmy.  Russell rats him out to save his own skin and Lydia, who has been cruelly rebuffed by Suzanne, agrees to wear a wire to entrap the black widow.  But Suzanne, not by design but by accident, speaks in an ambiguous way and the evidence is lacking to indict her.   She eludes arrest while Jimmy goes to prison for life and thirty years.  (his only solace remembering the love affair with Suzanne).  Lydia never really figures anything out and remains a pathetic bystander; Russell gets a shorter sentence.  Larry's family runs an Italian restaurant and has connections with the mob.  A hit man lures Suzanne down to the river with a proposal to get her a contract in Hollywood.  Larry's sister is an Icescapades skater.  In the final scene, she skates over a frozen millpond where Suzanne's corpse, who was called an "ice queen" earlier in the movie, is immured in ice.  

The film is beautifully shot, effectively suspenseful in its own way, and all the players are brilliantly cast and directed.  But the film's great incongruity is the glacial beauty of Nicole Kidman which is truly stunning and the impoverished milieu in which the action transpires.  The movie is also shot in a very glamorous way with bright shiny surfaces and brilliant lighting -- the film is very pretty although the story is not.  The glossy aspect of the film, and its fancy narrative technique (it hops around in time with some sequences featuring news and talk show interviews) contrasts very strongly with the film's low-rent pastiche of a film noir.  I've been comparing the movie to Billy Wilder's classic noir, Double Indemnity (1944) but the better, more apt comparison is to The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) in which a similar plot is played about against the background of a greasy spoon diner.  (The film features a cameo by the author, Joyce Maynard, of the novel on which the book is based plus uncredited appearances by George Segal as an unscrupulous motivational speaker who gropes Suzanne and David Cronenberg, oddly sinister as the mobster who kills the heroine.  

Tosca (Des Moines Opera - July 3)

 Puccini's Tosca is so popular that the opera seems to be in perpetual rotation -- I think I have seen it at least 8 times in my 35 years of opera attendance.  When properly performed with excellent singers, the show is compelling and, of course, the music ultra-dramatic (melodramatic, I suppose you could say) with exquisite melodic passages about every ten minutes.  The Des Moines opera production, performed at the Blank Performance Hall at Indianola, Iowa was beautifully crafted and, apparently, spared no expense as to cast, scenery, and costumes -- the show was so traditionally mounted, so utterly without pretense or high concept, that the opera seemed to me paradoxically post-modern.  Sometimes, the most avant-garde approach to an old war-horse like Tosca is to present it without artifice, without irony or camp, that is, without winking at the audience and cleaving closely to the intentions of the composer.  Tosca was first performed in 1900 and the Des Moines Opera production shows that the show can be gripping and, even, resonant when performed straight, no chaser.

Contemporary critics called the opera "nasty" and thought it depraved because of its subject matter.  Indeed, the opera has a certain noir aspect to it.  The voluptuous singing and elaborate sets are in service of a sordid story of murder and torture.  After Napoleon's departure from Rome, the authorities round up revolutionaries, apparently emboldened by the French conqueror's supposed democratic sympathies (which were an illusion), torture and, then, execute them.  (Aspects of the opera presage Rossellini's Rome - Open City -- there's a Gestapo aspect to the bad guys.)  Floria Tosca, a singer, is involved in a love affair with Caravadossi, a painter.  Cavaradossi provides aid to a revolutionary who climbs out of the sewer in the church where he is painting an image of Mary Magdalene.  The villain Scarpia is arresting revolutionaries and knows that Cavaradossi is tangled up with the subversives.  Scarpia lusts after the beautiful Tosca and stirs up her jealousy -- she is fickle, courageous and defiant, and not too smart -- implying that the painter who is now hiding with the rebel is courting another woman.  As Scarpia expects, Tosca knows where Cavaradossi is hiding, goes to him, and, thereby, reveals his whereabouts and the location of the revolutionary. The rebel commits suicide and the painter is captured.  Scarpia, then, indulges in some nasty sexual harassment -- he has Tosca's lover tortured within her ear-shot.  She can only save her boyfriend by agreeing to give herself to Scarpia.  Tosca agrees to surrender to him if he writes her a note guaranteeing safe passage out of Italy for the couple, Floria and Cavaradossi.  Scarpia also agrees to stage a fake firing squad execution of Cavaradossi with the plan that the painter, feigning death, will come back to life after the soldiers depart and flee with Tosca.  As Scarpia approaches Tosca lecherously she stabs him to death with a small dagger -- "this is Tosca's kiss!" she cries as the blade sinks into his heart.  The next morning, Cavaradossi faces the firing squad.  But Scarpia has lied about feigned firing squad.   The bullets actually pierce Cavaradossi and he falls dead.  Tosca is beset by thugs set on revenging Scarpia and she climbs to the parapet of the Castello San Angelo and flings herself off the top of the fortress.  The climax comes with shocking speed -- it's all over in a couple of minutes without any lengthy arias; the music roars briefly at the audience and, then, everyone is dead.

The first act's set epitomizes the no-irony aspect of the production.  The action takes place in a baroque church and the set has replicated this location in voluptuous, even, alarming detail -- there are towering square pilasters with gilded Corinthian capitols, wall-size paintings, a baptismal font from which the harried rebel drinks like a dog, a terrazzo floor, and even a small chapel in a niche that is sectioned-off with a wrought iron fence or grill.  It's elaborate and gasp-inducing -- the set is concealed behind a scrim and only revealed a few minutes into the act.  Puccini has a propensity to layer his musical settings, invoking a disconnect between the different strata -- at the end of the first act, the stage fills up with ecclesiastics, altar boys with censors, worshipers and a Prince of the Church who carries an elaborate monstrance, elevating the host to solemn music as Scarpio, like Richard III, soliloquizes as a basso profundo, on his evil plot to "have the head" of the concealed rebel.  Tosca teases her boyfriend and there's an erotic edge to their byplay -- she's self-consciously fickle an attractive affectation that is the very trait that Scarpia will use to trap her and Cavaradossi.  The second act is far more sparsely decorated -- it's Scarpia's headquarters, a table piled with food, some candelbra, and a red-tinted torture chamber off-stage.  The third act represents the parapet of the San Angelo fortress with an avenging angel seemingly in bas relief looming over the right side of the set -- the profile of St. Peter's basilica is visible over the castle wall and, as the dawn advances, the sky brightens.  Puccini likes dawn scenes -- there's one in Turandot and, also, La Boheme -- and he lavishes his most inventive music on those episodes.  The dawn in Tosca sounds almost like aleatory music, little spurts of woodwind, clicking percussion, bells ringing in the distance.  In general, the orchestration is ultra-expressive, a bit like Strauss in Elektra or Salome but with better melodies. 

The singing was exquisite:  Laura Wilde brought a Wagnerian timbre to her singing.  She is attractive and actually can act in addition to her majestic voice.  Brian Michael Moore was splendid as the doomed Cavaradossi -- he has a spectacular tenor voice and, when he hits the high-notes in his arias, its like the brassy sun flooding the landscape with radiance.  It seems as if his voice is on the verge of shattering in its upper register so there's a thrilling edge to his singing.  Scarpia, played charismatically by Norman Garrett, as is the case with many villains, has all the best lines and "outherods Herod" in the role.  He dominates the action and, when Tosca is about to commit suicide, her mind is on Scarpia, not her boyfriend Cavaradossi -- she shrieks something like "I'll see you Scarpia before God", promising, I think, heavenly vengeance, but there's a slight suggestion that, maybe, the villain has excited her more than would be seemly.