Oh, Come On!
Over this weekend, I finally watched Farinelli. Now, look. If you’re going to make a movie about people who are willing to mutilate their family members for love of music, and you’re not a musician yourself, for God’s sake hire a consultant. I would be willing (reluctantly) to forgive the terrible “conducting” (though at the time, this would almost certainly have been done from the harpsichord, another detail the movie ignores) and lip synching. That’s pretty standard. But at one point, towards the end of the movie, Handel finds Riccardo Broschi (Farinelli’s brother) composing in the attic (don’t ask). He proceeds to suggest that, in order to build dramatic tension, the piece should modulate into a new key…and then, to demonstrate, he plays it exactly as Riccardo had just been playing it. And then, he says with a leer, you should introduce a chromatic D-flat. And again he plays it exactly the same. Why bother? How hard would it be to make the dialogue and the music actually bear some relationship to each other?
Musical quibbles aside, the whole thing is a bit of a muddle. The movie opens with what is (I think) an opium induced hallucination, except that Farinelli’s opium dependence isn’t introduced as a plot element until about an hour later. And then it sort of comes and goes as necessary to support the plot. We then have a flashback, followed by a flash-forward, followed by a flash-further-forward, and then, finally, the story begins moving approximately linearly. But by then, I was terribly confused and sort of grumpy. The mix of French and Italian is also very confusing. I never figured out any rhyme or reason to when the characters were speaking French and when they were speaking Italian.
One last gripe: it’s entirely possible that the level of hysteria is an accurate portrayal of early 18th century Italian musicians. But it makes for really annoying entertainment and tends to preclude anything that would qualify as character development.
The music itself is quite good. Not having access to castrati anymore, they created the sound by blending a female soprano and a counter-tenor. I don’t have any idea if it resembles the true castrato sound, but it made for interesting listening. And the performances, particularly of Handel’s Rinaldo near the end, are very nice. But skip the movie and just get the soundtrack.
