Tale of a kidnapped diva hits wrong note
Bel Canto 15 cert, 101 min Dir Paul Weitz
Starring Julianne Moore, Ken Watanabe, Christopher Lambert, Sebastian Koch, Ryo Kase, María Mercedes Coroy, Tenoch Huerta, Noé Hernández
Ann Patchett’s wellregarded 2001 novel Bel Canto was inspired by the 1996 hostage crisis in Lima, when 14 armed guerrilla fighters hijacked a party at the residence of the Japanese ambassador, and held hundreds of guests to ransom.
Incongruous though these surroundings may feel for what turn out to be multiple romantic
assignations to the strains of worldfamous arias, this is the blueprint Patchett laid down, by making her main character a celebrated soprano whose talent places her kidnappers in a stronger bargaining position.
Set, like the book, in an unnamed South American country, Paul Weitz’s film sets up a long-range attraction between American singer Roxane Coss (Julianne Moore) and her fellow prisoner Katsumi Hokosawa (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese industrialist whose birthday party, at the vicepresident’s mansion, she has agreed to grace for an exorbitant price.
This concert has been diplomatically organised to pave the way for a local business proposition the magnate has no intention of pursuing: he’s just obsessed with her.
And when shots ring out during the recital and the whole place goes into militarised lockdown, it’s an early sign of feeble credibility in the script that this siege feels like Katsumi’s lucky day. Who needs Tinder, after all, when you can snuggle up during a sizzling hostage crisis? It’s not only these two who set a slow fire burning over the weeks of incarceration to follow, but also Katsumi’s translator (Ryo Kase) and a female guerrilla who catches his eye, nudgingly named Carmen and played with some feeling by the Guatemalan actress María Mercedes Coroy.
As the authorities grow impatient, showing no sign of acceding to the group’s demands, these four are busy boning up on their foreign languages and slipping in and out of each other’s bedrooms as if there’s nowhere else they’d rather be.
When the water gets cut off, guerrilla leader Benjamin (Tenoch Huerta) has the brainwave of bringing Roxane out on to a balcony to sing for their collective supper. She chooses Vissi d’arte from Puccini’s Tosca, one of several arias performed beautifully by Renée Fleming for the film with Moore diligently, if not quite flawlessly, lip-synching.
The gamble works, water flows again, and a charmed variety of Stockholm syndrome descends on the whole party like a spell. Banquets are cooked, Christopher Lambert’s French ambassador proves a dab hand at Scott Joplin, football skills are flaunted in the front garden. If you think it’s beneath anyone’s dignity to have Roxane privately tutor a novice commando in his amateur crooning, you may have come to the wrong film.
The point is clear enough: love and art are hoisted on to a higher plane as currencies to unite us all, while crude politics and pesky bloodshed – often represented by Sebastian Koch’s role as a shifty Red Cross negotiator – drag us apart.
But Milan Kundera or Shakespeare this is not. The film nudges absurdity for pitching its thesis so sentimentally, complete with crass foreshadowing – “it’s opera, so everyone dies”, Roxane quips, for seemingly no other reason, before her soon-to-be-interrupted recital.
Directed with zero verve, it all feels like a mildewed throwback to the days 20 years ago when Miramax would have snapped this property up (like Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, which pitted carnal pleasure against the Church) and marketed it shamelessly for middlebrow class.
Even Moore seems quite stranded, given little chance to animate her character except as an unenviable technical exercise. Love is meant to be soaring across parapets, melding destinies with the fluttering elegance of a high B flat, but in Bel Canto, flat is the operative word.