Copyright New Republic Jun 3, 1996The theater career of David Belasco (1853-1931) had an effect on many who don't even know his name. His theater directing, in which he was a pioneer of realism, influenced American style and taste lastingly. His play-writing career, which in contrast was intransigently romantic, still touches us today. Never heard of him? Two of his plays were Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West.
Puccini saw Butterfly in London in 1900. Belasco's play (based on a story by John Luther Long) worked its way into the composer's mind as an operatic subject, and he asked his customary librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, to adapt it. Odd fact: Giacosa, who had also worked on such romances as La Boheme and Tosca, was in his own right a naturalistic dramatist and a friend of Zola's.
Another odd fact: at its premiere at La Scala on February 17, 1904, Butterfly was a catastrophic fiasco. Some say there was a hostile claque, some that the audience resented the exotic touches in the score, some that the cast wasn't good. Puccini revised the work just a bit, and three months later, in Brescia, it was a thundering success. Quickly it became a staple of the world repertory. In 1967 the manager of a German opera house, known for his advanced views, escorted me around his theater, across the stage on which the set for that evening's performance was already in place. It was the little house above Nagasaki to which Pinkerton would bring his Japanese bride. I looked quizzically at the avantgarde manager. He blushed, shrugged and said, "I must have a Butterfly." Now the screen has her-again-in a French-sponsored film (sung in Italian with English subtitles), directed by Frederic Mitterrand, nephew of the late president. (Sony Classical distributes.) The opera was previously filmed in 1955, an Italian-Japanese production with a Japanese actress as Butterfly, her voice dubbed by an Italian soprano. (In 1932 Hollywood had filmed Belasco's play, without music and "modernized," with Sylvia Sidney and Cary Grant.) For his version, Mitterrand has a Chinese soprano, Ying Huang, who both acts and sings the role.
The filming is commonplace, with some fade-outs, presumably to make it more cinematic and with some insertsButterfly as the dancing girl she had been and might be again, along with clips of Japanese newsreels around 1904. But it remains an opera, quite conventionally filmed. The Orchestre de Paris is stirringly conducted by James Conlon of the Met. The singing is all a cut above adequate. So if you want another visit to Puccini's Japanese thermal baths, here's your chance.
But the film, as this medium often does with theater works, raises some issues about the piece. Foremost is an astonishment-that, at the turn of the century, when American expansionism and self-confidence were waxing, Belasco wrote and an audience approved this ruthless expose of the exploitation of a 15-year-old Japanese girl by an American. A naval officer, too. On his very wedding day Pinkerton even drinks a toast with Sharpless, the American consul, to the roving American who has a girl in every port.
Structurally, the libretto is flaccid. I don't know Belasco's original, but the film reveals that Act Two, Scene One, of the opera is little more than padding, except for "Un bel di" and Sharpless's visit with Pinkerton's letter. And the device by which the letter is not read to Butterfly is raw mechanics.
Scene Two, the finale, is a mess, dramaturgically. Pinkerton arrives after a three-year absence and doesn't disturb the sleeping Butterfly-so that the plot can clank along and he can return after the suicide. We are also asked to believe that he has persuaded his American wife to come along on this visit to this previous wife, who still thinks she is married to him, and to ask for the child of that marriage. Some persuader, that Pinkerton. He must also have persuaded the U.S. Navy to allow Kate to accompany him on the Abraham Lincoln; how else would she have arrived in Nagasaki with him?
Well, anyway, there are the tira mi su melodies. Also, before we sniff too haughtily, we might remember that James Joyce loved Puccini and, in one of his letters, addressed Nora as "My dear little Butterfly." Jim Jarmusch's early films, Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law and Mystery Train, were laconic and oblique-attempts to stretch concepts of drama and to be witty in those attempts. Night on Earth was a moderately clever episodic film that took place in taxis around the world. All these pictures had at least some claim to stylistic progress.
Now he has retrogressed. Dead Man (Miramax) is a reversion to a mode that became passe about twenty years ago. It's situated visually and structurally right in the center of the New German Cinema of the 1970s, the era of Kluge and Straub and (the dimmer works of) Fassbinder. As if to underscore his retrogression, Jarmusch chose to do this film in black and white. (His cinematographer, once again, is Robby Miller, who was at the center of that German movement.)
The key idea in those German films and in Jarmusch's latest is a sort of negativism, the rejection of conventional expectations-in narrative suspense, logical progress, character credibility-to cosset an audience that had already arrived at postmodernism through the easiest avenues of access. The overall effect of many of those films-I mean this only figuratively-is of filming while drugged. The filmmaker thinks he is moving purposefully, but the consonance of the film is all within his head; and is accepted as consonance in the heads of viewers eager to share the druggedness.
Dead Man is equipped to entice us into its affectless world because so many prominent people are in it:Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum, John Hurt, Alfred Molina, Gabriel Byrne. Depp has already shown a penchant for eccentric films: this one is only more so. The rest of them possibly wanted to be in it as a change from the usual-and of course because they liked Jarmusch's past work. Depp excepted, they have little to do.
It's the Old West in the 1870s. Depp is an accountant named William Blake (yep) from Cleveland who goes out there for a job in a plant run by Hurt and owned by Mitchum. The job doesn't materialize, and this city-bred type runs into a series of adventures, which leak into one another and which could just as easily be another series of adventures so long as they were unexplained, pointless and portentous. In the course of his escapades he meets an Indian who thinks he is the William Blake reincarnated, and the unlikelihood of this mistake is the funniest thing in the picture. It all ends elegiacally but emptily.
Come back, Jim Jarmusch. Come back to the pungency of your first films. Leave the 1970s. Come back to the future.
My Research
