Screen

...He's a cloudwalker of the utmost agility...

...A rehearsal pianist, profusely apologizing that union rules prevent him from granting the conductor much needed rehearsal time, simultaneously locks the piano so that Santos can't play it either...

...That's how we did it in San Francisco...

...singers are on the make, professionally and sexually, and Santos himself becomes embroiled in a love affair with his star soprano that threatens to wreck his marriage...

...Used to the factory-like conditions of a pre1989 Communist arts apparatus, Santos is soon up to his neck in the dither, dross, and occasional gratifications of democracy...

...His way of staging pub brawls and hijinks is so corny that I'm tempted to think that Chelsom has simply seen too many John Ford movies...

...And why shouldn't they...

...There has not been a comedy director since Keaton who has dared to allow as much beauty of landscape and climate into his work as Chelsom has because scenic beauty gorgeously photographed tends to distract the viewer from whatever is funny, but Chelsom, like Keaton, manages to make the very beauty of the backgrounds part of the film's humor...

...She's just a wife who's been betrayed once too often...

...The directorial inventions are as acute as the skill with which the actors fulfill them: Santos, demanding his salary from a particularly malevolent backstage bureaucrat, must bend to speak under a glass partition that screens the paymaster's office...

...Indeed, so is the movie's audience but such is the powerful gaiety of Chelsom's direction that it would take a very dull and overly rationalistic creature to wish himself anywhere else while watching this giddy pipedream...

...Tenor: "Great...

...When Ned Beatty as Locke (voice dubbed by Vernon Midgley) sings an English translation of "Return to Sorrento," you can see and feel each member of the audience focusing so intently on him that the performance seems to be becoming a beautiful memory even as you watch it...

...But Tannhäuser is saved by the intercession of his dead fiancée while Santos gets his show on the road only with a lot of hard work and some pretty slick finessing of union regulations...

...After some mishaps on the road, the hero's sidekick mutters, "We're in a shaggy dog story...

...That flower that blossoms on the conductor's baton at the end of Venus rightfully belongs in the band of Josef Locke's wide-brimmed hat...

...Santos is supposed to be a Tannhäuser with a nice doctorwife and daughter waiting for him back in Budapest, while his soprano-mistress, played by Glenn Close, is meant to be his Venus, erotically inspiring the conductor to the heights of art but also destroying his happy bourgeois marriage...

...But, Szabo, alas, has higher ambitions and the middle third of this movie sinks under those ambitions...

...I love it...

...Tenor: "Berlin...

...Szabo tries to create a neat parallel to the myth with his modern story...

...A middle-aged Hungarian conductor named Santos, a musician's musician rather than an international superstar, is summoned to Paris to conduct Tannhäuser for the "Opera Europa" (read Paris Opera...

...eter Chelsom, the writer-director of the new Irish comedy, Hear My Song, doesn't have to keep his feet on the ground...

...Close is versatile enough to play both psychotics (Fatal Attraction) and salt-of-the-earth paragons (Sarah, Plain and Tall), but theater-animal imperiousness a la Maria Callas is simply not in her line...

...They're all having affairs of their own...

...Santos (played by Niels Arestrup with both force and subtlety) is neither worm nor schemer...

...This marital blow-up would have taken place if Santos had been an adulterous doctor, lawyer, or truck driver...

...They are summed up by the movie's title...

...The parallel just doesn't work...

...A globe-trotting tenor (fine comic performance by Jay 0. Sanders), given his blocking by the director, identifies each move with one of the many Tannhäuser productions he's already done...

...Director: "Move downstage on that phrase...

...He is an artist trying to create under conditions that are very strange for him...

...If such were the sum of Meeting Venus, it would be one of the best comic tributes to the theatrical life ever filmed...

...True, Santos's wife is ready to show him the door, but her rage isn't inspired by any Venusian influence...

...It has no bearing on his profession and does not fulfill the putative theme of the film...

...The film makes it clear that Santos has had other liaisons...

...It's no use detailing his movie's plot, for the script is a piece of deliberate nonsense about a young concert promoter's search for a famous tenor who has become a recluse after a traumatic brush with the law...

...Orchestra members appear and disappear according to the vagaries of union contract clauses instead of the needs of the production...

...You may recall that Tannhäuser is about a poet-knight who experiences poetry-inspiring passion in the arms of the goddess Venus but finds his position in an orderly, Christian, family-oriented society undermined by his forbidden knowledge...

...RICHARD ALLEVA 18: 10 April 1992 Commonweal...

...This movie is like a lecturer who can't defend his thesis coherently but who so entertains his audience with delightful anecdotes that he wins himself a lot of good will...

...Director: "Now sing the rest of the aria kneeling...

...But Santos lives in the globetrotting, ethnically diverse and ethically relaxed world of international opera production and the denizens of that world not only don't condemn him for his extramarital affair, they show him a tolerance bordering on indifference...

...It's as if the grandeur of Irish cliffs and the jeweled opacity of Irish mists had rendered the inhabitants slaphappy...

...Second, Glenn Close, fine actress though she is, cannot radiate and overwhelm as her character must if the love story is to make any sense...

...For one thing, Tannhäuser lived in a homogeneous society...

...In his daffy, artfully artless way, Peter Chelsom captures the unquenchable implication that resides at the heart of all great performances: Your life has not yet surrendered to you its final revelation...

...It is Santos's job to conduct heavenly choruses but I wish his creator, Istvan Szabo, would keep his feet on the ground...

...The climax of the movie, the return of the legendary singer, Josef Locke, to the stage under the aegis of the hero actually accomplishes what the equivalent moment in Meeting Venus (Tannhauser's opening) flubs: a demonstration of how art touches the lives of audience members with magic...

...And, while the motivations of Chelsom's characters seem transparent, the director has a way of allowing them little moments of stillness, meditation, or the closeness of nature (as when the hero, after a brush with death, lies on his back and gazes up at the stars until an ecstatic smile suffuses his face) that keep us wondering if we really do understand these people after all...

...His songs earned him a death sentence because they proved he had lain with Venus, a definite no-no for any Christian knight...

...so, even when he tries to argue his case firmly, he is physically bowing to the little god of the account books...

...This soprano is the type that turns cautious men into midnight door-batterers who must be carted off by hotel security...

...the opera house's two impresarios scheme against each other, using Santos as a pawn...

...I love it...

...16: 10 April 1992 Commonweal But, in the last half hour, by focusing once again on the politics of theater production and scanting romance, Meeting Venus revives...

...Chelsom's style is hard to describe because it reconciles so many opposites...

...And the first third of Meeting Venus is exhilaratingly and painfully funny as Santos, a grown-up Alice, moves through the curiouser and curiouser Wonderland of an art world that is both state-sponsored and capitalistic...

...The opera's opening night is portrayed with suspense and wit, but it's too bad that Szabo couldn't resist a parting allegorical touch: when Santos conducts the closing notes of Wagner's work, his baton flowers just as Tannhäuser's staff flowers under the blessing of God...

...Writer-director Istvan Szabo, himself Hungarian, is a masterful, wonderfully sardonic observer of how individuals interact with, struggle against, do or don't survive under powerful organizations...

...Yet he is also capable of staging a slapstick scene, involving a cow and the deepest well in Ireland, that incorporates so many colliding elements of farce, fantasy, and downright terror that you don't know whether to laugh or rise screaming from your seat or do both simultaneously...

...Berlin was a wonderful production...