6 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Thursday8 August 2019

ARTS

Thrilling:

Nicolai

Elsberg as

Don Juan—

EmiliaTherese

Andrew Mellor

“10 Years of Opera for All” is embla-

zoned on staff T-shirts at this year’s

Copenhagen Opera Festival. The dec-

ade-old jamboree divides its loyalties

between popular entertainment and

avant-garde experimentation, with

boutique recitals woven discreetly in

between. Entire operas with chorus and

orchestra are presented ticketless on

city piazzas. Things happen on boats,

bicycles and in fringe theatres but

Copenhagen’s two opera houses are stu-

diously avoided. There’s hardly a glass

of champagne to be seen.

Unless you participate inDon Juan—a

“Requiem for Don Giovanni” dreamt-up

in cahoots with theatre company SORT/

HVID and ritualised in its warehouse at

the back of the city’s meatpacking dis-

trict. Mads Brauer of cult band Efterk-

lang takes care of the music, filleting

Mozart’s opera for its best bits while fil-

tering four singers and three instrumen-

talists through his familiar box of

electroacoustic tricks.

Those tricks work a treat initially as

Nicolai Elsberg’s basso profundo under-

pins an uncanny hybrid of plainsong,

polyphony and echt-Mozart. From the

darkness of an imagined basilica, the

audience files into an auditorium for

the Requiem proper. Arias are sung as

eulogies, intertwined with ranting

monologues from an individual (actor

Olaf Højgaard) consumed with jealousy

for the Don.

Next we are led into a club populated

by circus artists and seducers, who walk

chosen punters to the bar for bubbly,

gratis. Drowned in reverb until now, at

last the music takes on the pace and

excitability that powers Mozart’s opera;

counter-tenor Morten Grove Frandsen

romps gregariously through “Fin ch’han

dal vino”, microphone in hand, before

a thumping remix of Michael Nyman’s

“In Re Don Giovanni” gets muscles

twitching. Liberate yourselves,

Højgaard’s character hollers from a

balcony. Performance becomes party.

Despite the odd satirical barb, the

show is apparently untroubled by the

Don’s antics; an episode in which a vic-

tim of his abuse stuffs her mouth with so

many crisps she can no longer sing is

borderline offensive. Where others have

aligned the libertine’s behaviour with

the modern cult of lifestyle by way of a

critique, director Christian Lollike does

so apparently in celebration. Brauer’s

treatment of the music is by turns

empowering and castrating, but in no

opera house will you feel the character’s

motivations and impulses so closely.

Dangerous, morally bankrupt but

undeniably thrilling — that’s Don Juan.

To August 17,operafestival.dk

Mozart remixed and ready to party

OPERA

Don Juan

Copenhagen Opera Festival

aaaee

P

lace your bets now.Blinded

by the Lightis surely set to be

a stage musical. Gurinder

Chadha’s new film isBilly

Elliotwith racial tweaking

and Bruce Springsteen songs. Once

again a British boy (Viveik Kalra) rebels

against an overbearing parent to

embrace his music and his muse. Once

more the big set-piece is a dance

through the hero’s native streets —

Luton replacing County Durham —

while joy abounds and extras gawp.

Hard to believe a twinkle-toes version

for Theatreland doesn’t beckon.

This movie’s other godparent is

Chadha’sBend It Like Beckham. She por-

trays immigrant families with warmth

and idiosyncrasy. They don’t seem like

figures in a feel-good panto, or not often;

nor peons of morality storytelling work-

ing the political correctness fields. (This

story’s original teller was Sarfraz Man-

zoor, here co-adapting his memoir

Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion,

Rock ’n’ Roll).

Javed, played by Kalra with instant

likeability, is an Anglo-Pakistani 16-

year-old. Sprung from the family nest by

Spingsteen-mania, instilled by a school-

pal, he defies an authoritarian father

(Kulvinder Ghir) preaching filial obedi-

ence and conformist careerism. “Do

what the Jews do, they’re successful,”

orates dad, though he doesn’t think any

better of The Boss when insistently

misattributing Jewishness to him.

Javed goes on to find love, though in

this film that comes perilously close to

lurve. The romance plot is perfunctory;

the real love interest is Bruce. And you’d

better like his music because you’ll

be battered by it. “Born to Run” is

played on the soundtrack to the point

of meltdown.

The film keeps threatening to

overcook its fairytale optimism and

undercook its characters’ nourishing

reality. But fidelity of time and place

just about hold out. Time: the late 1980s

and the long haul of the austerity

Thatcher years. Place: that Britain of

combustive but sporadic and scattered

racial tensions.

Eyeless in Gaza. The Miltonic phrase

sums up one of documentary movie-

making’s longest sightless interludes.

Wherehasthe long, unflinching gaze

been — till now — at the Middle East’s

most infamous piece of land? At that cli-

ent penitentiary of Israel, squashed

between it and Egypt?

Andrew McConnell and Garry Keane’s

Gazatries to make amends; even over-

tries. So many stories are bundled in,

pregnant with woe or poignancy, that we

begin to feel worked over. Everything is

true, we’re sure: except perhaps for

those shots of the teenage girl from

wealthier Gaza playing her cello on a

promontory overlooking the sea. She

reallydoes this? Really sits like a lament-

ing angel sounding her earthly harp?

Anything could be true, of course, in

this 27-miles-by-seven strip of land

containing 2m Palestinians. We know

from the daily news the stories of

death or injury by the border fence.

We watch here the young rebels

sling-shotting their rocks. We meet the

paramedic working 16-hour shifts

and the patriarch (three wives, 40 chil-

dren) who lives with regular bereave-

ment bulletins.

In the alphabet of demonisation, H for

Hamas stands next to I for Israel. Some-

one says: “If we didn’t have Hamas, the

entire Palestinian problem would be

solved.” The rocket-holed apartment

blocks testify to the plague visited by

both houses. One block has been

impaled by a keeled-over minaret, as if

religion itself has been brought tum-

bling, Samson-style. The film’s dynamo

is in its details. The wheelchaired Pales-

tinian rapper; the beach guards taking

their serried bow to Mecca; the fishing

boat owner telling us the price for stray-

ing beyond the three-mile fishing limit:

gunboats. And — again it’s the detail,

human and inhuman, that turns the

knife of truth — “sometimes they spray

you with sewage.”

Today’s world is full of colonists’

descendants rushing to ex-colonies to

make amends.Stones Have Lawsisa

documentary by three Dutchmen set in

ex-Dutch Suriname. This bewitching

movie enacts a handover of history-

creating power. The directors — Lonnie

van Brummelen, Siebren de Haan and

Tolin Erwin Alexander — spoke with

native islanders whose slave forebears

haled from Africa. They drew out their

stories, proverbs and wisdoms; then

transformed them into scenes of drama-

recitative set liketableaux vivantsin

scenic exteriors. Riversides; forests;

craggy vales.

One foundation myth is a Flood vari-

ant. Others feature jungle gods and spir-

its. The archetype of the white-man

slaver is here, now remade into a

destroyer of forests. If the movie sounds

like a chastisement exercise, it is; but

more too. It celebrates a people’s animist

creeds and dreams: “The way we are

here, things speak to us.” It depicts their

nature-based art, craft and fables. (In

loving detail a man is observed fraying a

palm branch into an ornate mini-arch.)

And it renders truth and history into a

vernacular at once free and formalised,

jubilant and ironic. In the almost-last

scene, characters discuss the documen-

tary itself: its genesis, its agenda, and the

possibility, even faint, that it is just a

Trojan horse heralding more invasion

by the white man and his spirit.

Kevin Costner voices a dog’s thoughts

for the duration ofThe Art of Racing in

the Rain. The brain cowers; the soul

screams; it’s too much to contemplate.

But we criticshaveto sit through

these things. And the film is not really

that bad.

Garage mechanic and wannabe racing

driver Denny Swift buys Enzo as a pup

and watches him grow. He becomes a

lolloping, full-grown Labrador, his inner

soliloquies delivered in that slow,

cowlick monotone Costner has made a

speciality, sometimes even a thing of

grace. Milo acquires a wife (Amanda

Seyfried), a daughter, a mum-in-law

(Kathy Baker) and a delectably nasty

dad-in-law (Martin Donovan). But

never mind them. The dog tells the

story, and for sentimentalists he will be

the story.

Some things are so succulently tasty

you think they must be bad for you. But

not Hitchcock’s thrillers. Like all the

master’s greats,Notorious, his 1946 tale

of love, spying and murder conspiracy,

is a glorious maze of motive and emo-

tion, enriching the mind and imagina-

tion. The casting is yummy beyond

belief: Ingrid Bergman as the good-time

girl turned espionage pawn and nearly

martyr; Cary Grant as her spymaster

and lover-for-appearances(and eventu-

ally, we’ll be sure, for real); Claude

Rains, dapper andscintillatingas a Nazi

fifth columnist in a South America of

high-society expats.

It’s completely hypnotic: from the

twisting strands of a plot defying us fully

to trust anyone, to those Hitchcock spe-

cials, the shots and scenes where the

camera too is a lethal conspiracist.

Watch the crane shot, slow and swoop-

ing, that traverses a room to close in on a

vital room key half-concealed in a hand.

Watch the famous Ingrid-Cary kiss,

extended through time and space,

dragged out teasingly, mischievously

across rooms and across what seems

minutes of screen time.

When a Luton boy finds his inner Boss

FILM

Nigel

Andrews

Blinded by the Light

Gurinder Chadha

AAAEE

Gaza

Garry Keane, Andrew McConnell

AAAAE

Stones Have Laws

Tolin Alexander, Lonnie van Brummelen,

Siebren de Haan

AAAAE

The Art of Racing in the Rain

Simon Curtis

AAAEE

Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock

AAAAA

Above: Viveik Kalra as the

Springsteen-obsessed hero

of ‘Blinded By the Light’

Below right: Cary Grant

and Ingrid Bergman in

Hitchcock’s ‘Notorious’;

Milo Ventimiglia and Enzo

in ‘The Art of Racing in

the Rain’

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