Thriller as flat as Julianne’s warbling
THINK of Maria Callas opening her mouth to sing, and the voice of Coronation Street’s Hilda Ogden emerging, and you have the perfect metaphor for Bel Canto, a film which promises a great deal and disappoints on just about every level.
Inspired by Ann Patchett’s acclaimed 2001 novel of the same name, Bel Canto follows the story of Roxanne Coss, a world-famous operatic soprano who has been paid lavishly to sing at a private party in an unidentified Latin American country.
Government bigwigs, hoping to woo a Japanese tycoon called Mr Hosokawa (Ken Watanabe) into building a big local factory, have heard he’s a massive fan of opera in general, and Miss Coss in particular.
Inconveniently, no sooner has she begun to warble than angry revolutionaries burst in, brandishing machine-guns and taking everyone hostage. This is meant to be unspeakably dramatic, but merely succeeds in cauterising the pain of watching Moore conspicuously lip-synching her way through someone else’s aria.
She’s a glorious actress, so maybe it’s not her fault that her singing scenes look so hilariously unconvincing. Besides, a lack of plausibility dogs the film in several other ways.
The revolutionaries are little more than cardboard cut-outs, despite the strenuous efforts of writer- director Paul Weitz to imbue them with personality. Their country is itself a cliche: a North American’s idea of a South American banana republic.
So the so-called Stockholm syndrome that begins to develop between the hostages and their captors always feels confected, as does the inevitable romance between Miss Coss and her Japanese admirer.
Love, food, opera, even football and chess, are all cornily presented as common languages.
Weitz is best-known for making comedies ( American Pie, Little Fockers), but the laughs he generates here are all unintentional.
The only one he possibly intends, calling one of the revolutionaries Carmen, falls flat.
Bel Canto doesn’t really work as a love story, still less as a thriller. It fails even as a celebration of opera. It is tone-deaf.