Screen
O'Brien, Tom
director of the Boston Symphony, who, at Messiaen's own tion. A warming example is a published comment on a move- invitation, had directed the original performances at the Paris ment...
...There he stated that in the decision and action of Francis kissing the Screen leper, "Francis became St...
...Forelucidation of the modes of limited transposition, has been tunately, in Therese director Alain Cavalier uses stark visual wiser in its recognition of the limitations of human perception images and laconic drama to convey not damnation but spirituand expression than some of his recent remarks...
...Indeed, he often turns much less children seeing it for the first time, will be put off by them on their head...
...to be confused is another...
...UTCRACKER: THE MOTIONPICTURE is a disturbing misfire...
...Such editing conveys not battle scene between toy soldiers and an army of mischevious the nervous, jumpy frenzy of Godard, but rather a blithe mice...
...achievement stretching across six decades, testifies through Together with cinematographer Phillipe Rousselot (who seventy-times-seven examples of bold innovation, paradoxi- shot the camp treat Diva), Cavalier tells his story by focusing cal wit, and uncanny surrealistic grandeur to a more nuanced simply on the impishly beatific face of his young heroine and more active life of the human soul before God than these (Catherine Mouchet) and on one set with a soft gray-green recent comments suggest...
...after, divinized...
...Before, of this world...
...it's a voice that opera's music lay in the blending of three ondes martenots is mysterious, distant, very high, almost tender and (French electronic keyboards) into the massive orchestration...
...From constituted a wavering reality in comparison with the un- Conversations with Olivier Messiaen by Claude earthly projections of the ondes...
...When combined with Pacific Northto blunt the heavy-handed post-psychoanalytical cliche that west's pyrotechnics, Hoffmann's dream- within-dream strucfeminine devotion to Christ always represents sublimated sen- ture, and the kaleidoscopic whirligig of Sendak's designs, suality...
...In passages in which the electronic tones were buried under It is...
...I wonder if it was fully catches much of her spirit...
...The voice is so low, and the other so high, and the timbres are perfectly graded and modulated electronic tones clearly man- so strange that it's impossible to make out the notes...
...Commonweal: 660...
...The film is not simply "darker, juicier...
...In the film Mouchet's look and acting have much to do with this...
...No face these roles are danced by Hugh Bigney (who doubles as the in recent film so easily conveys an innocence at once so "Pasha"), and Vanessa Sharp and Patricia Barker who play unpretentious, uncomplicated, and unsolemn...
...Soprano Kathleen misery, with a deep and terrifying sound, a little like the Battle sang the role of the Angel...
...Francis...
...This central point of musical symbolism and many explicit In an age of the church preoccupied with graspable and details of the libretto Messiaen wrote for St...
...cavernous trumpetings and chants of Tibetan priests...
...His best moments have an intense music, too, not only St...
...In Hoffman, a Bohemian, But the treatment of the heroine is much more subtle...
...regularly on music for Commonweal...
...Her smiling Clara as a teenager and young woman...
...lent love/lust with his niece, the heroine Clara...
...Francis, particularly in the music as opposed cis receiving the Stigmata, and his resurrection in the next to the libretto...
...hardly audible...
...These passages triggered a primary response in this Tableau Four is another unforgettable sequence, and that the listener, a sense of the presence of the "unchanging" remem- symphony of the birds that follows Francis's sermon to them in bered from Latin Masses of two decades ago...
...The excerpts performed here leave one awaiting world - the effect was even more profound...
...The film is a conundrum: a invisible to Ballard and Sendak...
...in her wizardly inventor, "Herr Drosselmeier," indulges in ambivacase, sexuality is seen as part of religion, not vice-versa...
...TOM O'BRIEN skeptical but genuine look at the life of a saint...
...On by the tone-poetry and musical wit of a great composer, may the explicit, literary level of his opera, awe and self-abasement have their points to make...
...line is apt in itself...
...DAVID B. NOBLE are overriding responses to Incarnation, even at the remove of (David B. Noble, a Boston-based free-lance writer, writes Christ's perfect humanity communicated to his great saint...
...The result is both highly artificial warmth id them, without an elimination of his spiritual orienta- and at the same time realistically imitative of the restricted 5 December 1986: 659 world it depicts: the silent, austere life of early twentieth- The problem lies not with filming dance, which Ballard and century cloistered Carmelite nuns...
...To be and realistically stages her entrance into the novitiate as a charmingly mystified is one thing...
...Nevertheless, it respect- will probably be invisible to children...
...The faith is unchanging, he added, although symbolizations of it through T HERESE, winner of this year's Cannes special jury prize, music or stained-glass windows may change in fashion...
...Who, the London Symphony, and the innovative Pacific Northwest Whom who bath sent, 0 atomizing shade...
...Messiaen revealed an absolutistic, monistic view of human spirituality in a synopsis he wrote of the opera's action...
...Before agreeing to do the film, Sendak and Since Therese is the story of a young Carmelite canonized in Ballard insisted on returning to the original tale of early 1925, the odd, discontinuously physical style fits content nineteenth-century master E.T.A...
...Even those familiar with the Nutcracker, both religious institutions and women...
...John Ftrdel IThe film is based on the Tchaikovsky ballet, but as AMDG revised by two superb visual artists: Maurice Sendak, the children's book illustrator, and Caroll Ballard, director of The Curious brains to make a bomb were made...
...Francis, but also his compositional weightlessness that sends one soaring...
...The filmmakers wanted a stronger story, something Therese of Lisieux was the third (and youngest) of four "juicier, darker," as Sendak says, returning to Hoffmann's daughters in a French family to join the Carmelites...
...But it isn't a Messiaen stated through an interpreter that the core of the terrifying voice of thunder and lightning...
...Francis make it communicable aspects of Incarnation, first-class images of clear that Messiaen's personal piety, as differentiated from his awe and even of terror in the presence of the divine, leavened musical style, is quite pre-conciliar and ultra-tridentine...
...this compassionate musical preacher that one mostly the grand resonances of 250-odd players and singers - Fran- encounters in St...
...Stainer and Bell, London, 1961...
...Many receding sets which produce the illusion of three-dimensional scenes start, then seem to stop abruptly, as a new face is depth...
...young girl's fantasy of coming of age, it seems based, however Therese presents an artist's interpretation of Therese of innocently, on the prior fantasies of older males...
...An erotic viding the film with some awkward echoes of headlines about nuance doesn't make such love in the least questionable, child abuse...
...Petita...
...One would think tradition The moreof us blown up by one or two is here in good hands...
...this film's awkward method, especially the uneven spacing of Most crucially, Cavalier uses his light, neutral, visual style the voice-over narration...
...Ballet, and one almost expects something for Christmas to outdo Dickens...
...elusiveness, as if the camera itself saw as someone would who Even the filmmakers' daring revision of the traditional story was only half there, only half involved with material reality...
...background, into which dramatic properties (chairs, beds, or Earlier remarks by Messiaen have had more of humanistic tables) are moved as needed...
...Hoffmann, not the derived perfectly...
...The film suggests that this may be true for One troubling element, however, is all too clear...
...One did not hear, the whole opera, live or on record...
...Baritone Jose van Dam and tenor Kenneth Riegel, who I've given simultaneous sound to a very low voice sang the respective roles of Francis and the Leper, were which represents the bottom of the abyss of human brought over from the Paris production...
...is a strange religious film in the "pure" cinematic style Messiaen's own work in musical theory, particularly his derived from French masters like Robert Bresson...
...Her tale of a young girl's dream of maturity and sexual awakening...
...Sendak have obviated by staging the ballet before magnificent Unusual editing also provides visual flair to Therese...
...This ifested a different mode of existence from that of the instru- strikes me as marvelously conveying the ideas of penimental sounds which, well played as they mostly were, still tence, reverence, and of vertigo before the Holy...
...the Carmelites...
...Lisieux, lacking some of her depth and an explicit understand- The film has received a "G" rating, and its sexual subtext ing of the sources of her love of God...
...Some acquainted with the but rather felt, the awesomeness of the divine present within entire score report that the music 'of the Angel Musician in 'the human...
...Cavalier pre- Unfortunately, Ballard and Sendak forgot to control the sents Mouchet as eagerly anticipating "betrothal" to Christ story, which is told incoherently, even for a dream...
...one of human frailty and divine impassibility intertwined...
...She echoing less the Gothic ogre than modern Peeping Tom, proloves him...
...RITES OF PASSAGE Messiaen sounded another integrist note when he said, in 'THERESE' & 'NUTCRACKER' response to a question about current questions in the church, that "There are no questions in the church...
...wedding...
...Samuel...
...some, especially in one scene when a circle of nuns affection- Hoffmann's basic story is, like all good fairy tales, genuinely ately cradle a statue of the Christ Child, and where Cavalier scary, a variation on all Gothic kidnapping recipes, from "The modishly insinuates that religion, in effect, is a cover for eros.Erl-King" to Wuthering Heights...
...Bigney archly overacts, declarations of love to Christ are without hidden meaning...
...for a simply fully human...
...Those sets provide visionary brilliance, and the dancing presented, but is blacked out again before it speaks, and then is some memorable moments, especially a wittily choreographed represented again for conversation...
...That love draws on all her personality...
...Although Cavalier does not ignore the cost of such a Film, a fit medium for the fantastic, is, nevertheless, less vocational choice to the sisters' elderly, widowed father, or the forgiving than stage when narrative becomes tangled and conhuman realities of jealousy and backbiting among the nuns fusing...
...In a press conference held before the Boston performances, and, above, the voice of God replying...
...Add to this Sir Charles MacKerras and Acknowledgedatomsplitters in Who's...
...A warming example is a published comment on a moveinvitation, had directed the original performances at the Paris ment of his 1951 Organ Book: Opera...
...See for example, Poulenc's opera The Dialogue of Nutcracker becomes too much to follow...
...Are the wrestlers in more complex struggles, without such absolute turning points - Newman, for instance - really so far outside the pale...
...Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf...
...on celluloid, things may be implausible, but must be around Therese, he avoids simple-minded judgments against clear and consistent...
...In performance, this mixture created a profound sonic image One has absolutely no idea of what one is hearing...
...There is no background music in the film, as if pablum of the elder Dumas or Tchaikovsky's librettist Marius sound itself were too worldly...
...Messiaen's ality, albeit of an odd kind...
...motives are depicted as both joyous and erotic...
...Tableau Five is one of the great moments in music...
...Is it really that clear-cut...
Vol. 113 • December 1986 • No. 21
