Sunday, September 27, 2009

Review: I, Don Giovani

In this piece of faction from veteran Spanish director Carlos Saura, I, Don Giovani tells the story of Lorenzo Da Ponte and the development of his second collaboration with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Il dissoluto punito o sia Il Don Giovanni.  Sauro collaborated on the script with Raffaello Uboldi and Alessandro Vallini.

The tale begins in Da Ponte's youth, when he is forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity to enable his widower father's marriage to an 18-year old Catholic woman.  When he's older, he trains to be a priest, but practices the fine art of debauchery of in his spare time.  He is surrounded by inspiration for the story he ends up writing for Mozart's opera, and in fact his on-screen life plays out in opera fashion, complete with musical performances of songs from the opera.

The story is intriguing, with seduction, cheating, back-biting jealous divas, illness, and other great opera themes.  The film works Da Ponte's real life drama into the story of Don Giovani in a very clever way, which is only fitting since most of Da Ponte's work was in the form of adaptations of previous work.  But while the picture is visually impressive, it suffers a bit in the sound department.  Some of the post-production re-recorded dialog didn't match up with the picture very well, which proved distracting.  The bigger issue, though, were occasional dull patches in the plot.  My imdb rating: 6/10.

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