La Boheme

"Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (called a libretto) and musical score.” Right? And film “emcompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form and when these images are shown rapidly in succession, a viewer has the illusion that motion is occurring.”

As I watched Mimi and Rodolfo sing their tragic song in the snow, I am gripped all at once by: the terrible camera work; the beauty of their voices; amazement at how bad their acting is (dramatic reaction face, check, kneeling in the snow despairing at life and justly expressing anguish at being poor/dying/being in love, check); the exquisite arrangement of the black costumes surrounded by pure white snow and I didn't know how to react to such a beautiful story being slashed, ruined, hacked, chainsawed, chopped, gutted and altogether destroyed by 'romantic' crossovers, flipped mirror images and about a thousand close up of 'reactions' to something we all know about but are waiting for them to actually SAY it. My, my.

You see, I was very excited to think that an opera had been turned into a film but the singing had been kept. Unfortunately it seems that Robert Dornhelm had failed to see how to marry the two lovely things together and ended up stumbling between a theatrical set and film set. There are rules, dear Dornhelm, when it comes to the two different things, and they must be kept to. It's about just as obvious as the rule 'don't run with scissors.'

I don't mean to rant and I certainly don't want to give the impression that there weren't some utterly lovely moments such as the second last shot of the entire film – it breaks your heart when she dies.

But back to that scene in the snow. In my opinion simplicity is the key, especially when the main attractions of La Boheme are the voices and the tragic story. Therefore the focus needs to be on the voices but whilst being able to move the story forward in a realistic way in that the time frames feel right and that the events which occur provide an appropriate sequence to the ultimate ending. That wasn't achieved in that scene, nor in any other scene really, because at the insistence trying to show the audience the pained expressions of both Mimi and Rodolfo in so many different shots as possible in such a short time. I think it would have worked better if just three angles had been used to show the dialogue between the two. The effect of their black clothes and black hair against the snow (their poverty blackens the beauty of the white and pure snow around them) and their voices would have been enough, perfect even.

It was clear that the positions they used and movements would have worked on the stage (they part and come together, again and again when singing) but on the screen it was stilted. And so they tried to cover it up by breaking it up with lots of different angles instead of biting the bullet by actually taking a step further and getting the actors to move in a fluid manner – and that could've been achieved by cutting some of the dialogue and shortening it as it hampered the 'real' passage of time.

It was like watching something in slow motion but then the characters would move in real time and then the whole world would melt. Then the puzzlement would magnify when the subtitles said that Rodolfo had really just taken 2 minutes to say 5 words. Oh, how awful it would have been if one of them had garlic for lunch.

Am I making sense here?

Basically what I'm trying to say is a film is a film and a opera is an opera. You can't have both and so if you want to tell the story of La Boheme on screen, you have to use the film rules. Bring in longer sequences – forget using the act layout so literally – cut down the long winded nature of the singing (especially if you're translating from another language) so that the audience's attention can be retained as you develop each character and their relationships. We only got to see snippets of each person's personality and I was often confused as they changed so much. The acting – to be a broad actor works well on stage. On screen you see everything. There's no point in standing motionless and blank faced when you discover Mimi is dying, do something!

By making it complicated (ironically by over-simplifying it) you'll lose the new audience that you need to make back the money. I would imagine that La Boheme was a gamble and no one will be too happy if it doesn't sell well.

I would love to get my hands on it and give the opera the interpretation it deserves! Some of it was just so beautiful, I was really quite sad about the whole thing.