As an avid fan of Jacques Offenbach's "Les Contes D'Hoffmann", I was immediately enthralled when I picked up this video and rushed home so as to have a better opportunity to enjoy it. I popped the tape in and waited expectantly, hoping and praying for an inspired cinematic vision of the opera I came to love so dearly.
It never came. What I got was the pretentious mixing of opera and ballet into a package which was wholly non-enjoyable and completely inane. There are so many things wrong with this sack of artistic droppings that I find it staggering to try and enumerate them all. However, I will do my best in the hopes that it stops anyone else from watching this and violating their perception of what is otherwise a brilliant opera.
In the first place, while this version of the opera is understandably translated to English, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten that Offenbach's music was written for use with the French language. As such, translating the French text into English and setting it to music which is not amicable to the English language is going to naturally make the plot and characters more difficult to understand. Therefore, the LAST THING one needs to do is change Hoffmann's loves/villains into ballet stars as well. Typically, ballet is done to a purely instrumental soundtrack with the story set out in a program or otherwise narrated so that the audience is not distracted by confusion. This...thing...both ups the possibility of confusion by adding vocals to the background score AND attempts to turn a very complicated story which was never INTENDED to be used as a ballet into just that - a story told through dance, which by necessity requires a simple story. One wonders if Dr. Miracle was on the production team for this bomb.
That brings me to my second point. The physical stature of the main characters is integral to the audience taking the opera seriously. NO ONE can take Robert Helpmann seriously as the four villains. Oh, the makeup artists and costumers do a fine job making him LOOK evil, but his height and the way he acts on screen undoes all their work. This is especially true in the third act (Antonia), where Helpmann turns the diabolical Dr. Miracle into a dancing fairy. I'm sorry, but if he tried to sell MY daughter poisonous medicine, I'd have trouble stopping myself from laughing. He just looks ridiculous. Then again, so does the rest of the cast whenever dancing occurs in this foul affair, but the Miracle episode is especially frightening. I remember watching Dapertutto prance around during the Diamond aria and thinking "Where's the diamond? Or did you leave it at home with your ADD medication?" Bloody terrible.
In conclusion, I read a lot of comments on here about how the vivid colors and elaborate set pieces improved this movie for its viewers. Perhaps this is true, but frankly, neither vivid colors nor elaborate set pieces like the kind used in this film belong in the opera. This is a dark, serious opera about the nature of love and human experience, not a set-designer's acid trip like Cirque du Soleil. This film version is utterly unfaithful to the opera's origins, almost impossible to comprehend without knowing the opera very well and nothing but a pretentious hybrid of two art forms which can only be combined in very special circumstances. This, however, is not one of those. I urge you to give this film as wide a berth as you would give Dr. Miracle's products at the pharmaceutical section of Longs Drugs.
-Nastarinevonjacobis
It never came. What I got was the pretentious mixing of opera and ballet into a package which was wholly non-enjoyable and completely inane. There are so many things wrong with this sack of artistic droppings that I find it staggering to try and enumerate them all. However, I will do my best in the hopes that it stops anyone else from watching this and violating their perception of what is otherwise a brilliant opera.
In the first place, while this version of the opera is understandably translated to English, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten that Offenbach's music was written for use with the French language. As such, translating the French text into English and setting it to music which is not amicable to the English language is going to naturally make the plot and characters more difficult to understand. Therefore, the LAST THING one needs to do is change Hoffmann's loves/villains into ballet stars as well. Typically, ballet is done to a purely instrumental soundtrack with the story set out in a program or otherwise narrated so that the audience is not distracted by confusion. This...thing...both ups the possibility of confusion by adding vocals to the background score AND attempts to turn a very complicated story which was never INTENDED to be used as a ballet into just that - a story told through dance, which by necessity requires a simple story. One wonders if Dr. Miracle was on the production team for this bomb.
That brings me to my second point. The physical stature of the main characters is integral to the audience taking the opera seriously. NO ONE can take Robert Helpmann seriously as the four villains. Oh, the makeup artists and costumers do a fine job making him LOOK evil, but his height and the way he acts on screen undoes all their work. This is especially true in the third act (Antonia), where Helpmann turns the diabolical Dr. Miracle into a dancing fairy. I'm sorry, but if he tried to sell MY daughter poisonous medicine, I'd have trouble stopping myself from laughing. He just looks ridiculous. Then again, so does the rest of the cast whenever dancing occurs in this foul affair, but the Miracle episode is especially frightening. I remember watching Dapertutto prance around during the Diamond aria and thinking "Where's the diamond? Or did you leave it at home with your ADD medication?" Bloody terrible.
In conclusion, I read a lot of comments on here about how the vivid colors and elaborate set pieces improved this movie for its viewers. Perhaps this is true, but frankly, neither vivid colors nor elaborate set pieces like the kind used in this film belong in the opera. This is a dark, serious opera about the nature of love and human experience, not a set-designer's acid trip like Cirque du Soleil. This film version is utterly unfaithful to the opera's origins, almost impossible to comprehend without knowing the opera very well and nothing but a pretentious hybrid of two art forms which can only be combined in very special circumstances. This, however, is not one of those. I urge you to give this film as wide a berth as you would give Dr. Miracle's products at the pharmaceutical section of Longs Drugs.
-Nastarinevonjacobis