Inspired by the Gene Siskel Film Center‘s screenings this upcoming week of Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute—all part of the theater’s extensive “Bergman 100” series—we’ve selected five other opera films of note. If this list seems a bit highbrow, know that we would have listed Chuck Jones’s great Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon What’s Opera Doc? in all five spots if we could have. But these are good too.
Don Giovanni Joseph Losey’s film of Mozart’s opera (1979) has redundant trappings of Freud and Marx, as if Losey felt the need to make the material more personal. He shouldn’t have bothered, because it already plays straight to his concerns: Giovanni, with his self-destructive idealism, stands in the line of Losey heroes from The Boy With Green Hair to Mr. Klein. The visual context is ravishing, with a lighting scheme that builds from the understated and naturalistic to shocking contrasts of black and white. Meanwhile, the camera moves with a preternatural grace, drawing clean, curving lines through the romantic confusions. If the film has a fault, it is a common one in Losey: the absence of an emotional support for his piercing intellectual observations. 179 min. —Dave Kehr
