George Frideric Handel and Nicola Francesco Haym | Tamerlano / 2009

the sacrifice

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Frideric Handel (music), Nicola Francesco Haym (libretto), Tamerlano / LA Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the performance my companion Howard and I attended was on November 25, 2009

 

The Tartar emperor Tamerlano, with the help of the Greek Prince Andronico, has just defeated and captured the Turkish sultan Bajazet, who makes it clear he would rather die than remain in the hands of his foe. Only the love of his daughter, Asteria, also held captive, keeps him from death.

     Meanwhile Tamerlano, who is betrothed to Irene, Princess of Trebizon, has fallen in love with Asteria, and hopes to marry her, offering his ally Andronico Irene if he will help in obtaining Bajazet's permission for Asteria to marry him.

     The story grows quickly more complex when we discover that Andronico and Asteria are in love, and, accordingly, Andronico has been asked to help in his own ruin; yet he owes very kingdom to the Tartar.

     The sultan rejects the proposal outright, insisting his daughter will never marry Tamerlano; but when Asteria hears of Andronico's plea on Tamerlano's behalf, she is heart-broken that her lover seemingly no longer cares for her, and she refuses to speak out against Tamerlano's proposal, which in turn leads the Greek Prince to doubt her love for him.

     Like many a Baroque opera, the plot quickly grows even more complex; Irene, determined to thwart Asteria's and Tamerlano's relationship, arrives on the scene, encouraged by Andronico to pretend she is simply an emissary from the Princess, which will give her time discover his true feelings.

     The very set of circumstances Handel has set in play. Borrowed from Agostino Piovene's 1710 opera of the same name, results in a kind of standstill: to protect her father and out of anger over what she sees as Andronico's betrayal, Asteria must go forward with Tamerlano's wishes; Andronico cannot speak out for fear of destroying both Asteria and her father; Irene out of pride has no choice pretend she is not herself. In short, no one, save Bajazet, can or will speak out. As in all tyrant-controlled worlds, the truth dare not be uttered.

      Placido Domingo plays the Baroque hero almost as if he were on a Nineteenth-century stage, often dominating the action with his full and rich tenor voice. Since he is dramatically the most forceful figure, however, perhaps this is not as ineffective as it may first have seemed. Dressed, unlike the other modern-suited figures, in a glorious Turkish robe, he is the perfect foil for countertenor Bejun Mehta's high-pitched fascist rage. Andronico, sung by mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon, is nearly perfect as the quieter lover, unable to speak out until Act III. With soprano Sarah Coburn, playing Asteria, their duet at the beginning of that act, a love song sung in a dissonant melody, is one of the best moments of the opera.

      Again and again through this opera, the tyrant Tamerlano is rejected or betrayed, first by Bajazet, then by Asteria who admits she had hidden away a dagger to kill him on their wedding night and later attempts to poison him, and finally by Andronico, his supposed friend. By opera's end he has little left but to threaten to destroy them all, and the frenzy that his hate arouses is perfect for Mehta's expressive voice.

      Yet the opera remains at a kind of stasis, Tamerlano outwardly plotting his revenge while being unable to destroy two of the people he has most loved and the other, who in his courageous outspokenness, he can only admire. Bajazet, moreover, threatens to haunt and hunt him down even from the grave.

      The only release possible is Bajazet's suicide by poison. As he sways forward after ingesting his "hidden treasure" he moves between threats to Tamerlano and sweet goodbyes to his daughter and her lover Andronico. As conductor William Lacey appropriately writes of this scene:

 

                          The scene ends with Bajazet stuttering his final words,

                          gasping for breath, as the orchestra describes his fading

                          heartbeat with slowly receding repeated notes. It is an

                          amazingly vivid and inspired piece of work, which antici-

                          pates the later innovations of Gluck, Berlioz, and Wagner.

 

     Although Asteria, demanding a dagger, threatens her own suicide, Bajazet's "sacrifice" is enough to soothe Tamerlano's hate. He is appeased. He will marry Irene and Andronico can be united with Asteria in Greece.

     The final chorus of this nightmare opera is a gentle hymn to the slowly rising sun, a celebration of the transformation of night into day, the shadows reaching out to the morning light.

 

Los Angeles, Thanksgiving day, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog and USTheater, Opera and Performance (November 2009).   

Giuseppe Verdi and Antonio Ghislanzoni | Aida / 2009

buried alive

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (composer), Antonio Ghislanzoni (libretto, based on a French scenario by Auguste Mariette) Aida / the production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera live HD, in encore on Thursday, November 12, 2009

One of the aspects of Aida that interviewer / singer Renée Fleming suggested several times in the intermissions of Verdi's great opera was that, despite the huge size of the cast, except for the scenes in court and the triumphal march of Act 2, Scene 2, the opera is an intimate work, centered around a love triangle of the characters Aida (Violeta Urmana), Radamès (Johan Botha), and Amneris (Dolora Zajick).

     What particularly struck me this time through the opera was not only how truly intimate most of the work was, but how psychologically isolated each of these figures are from one another, despite the fact that their every action has enormous effect on the others.

 

   In few other operas do the major characters sing so many arias consisting of what we might describe as internal dialogue. In Se quel guerrier io fossi!...Celeste Aida, Radamès sings of his love and the beauty of Aida to himself, terrified that Amneris might get wind of it. Amneris sings of her need to discover the name of Aida's lover, and later describes her plots to expose her slave.  Aida, who secretly is the Princess of Ethiopia, sings of numerous things she cannot share with others, her love of her country, the identity of her lover, her father, and herself. Radamès' desire to lead the Egyptian military into victory can also only be expressed in private thoughts. Like Eugene O'Neill's 20th century drama Strange Interlude most of the characters of this 19th century opera spend a great deal of time in soliloquy. Without these private interludes, in fact, there would be no story left to tell. For the public events of the opera, Radamès' victory over the Ethiopians, his plea that the captives be saved, and his reward of marriage to Amneris, are the forces that doom them all, and speed two of them to their death by being entombed alive.

     It is apparent from what I have just suggested, accordingly, that all three characters have lived buried lives long before the final scene from the very outset of the work. Radamès must hide his love and his ambition both as he tries to balance opposing forces, for his desire to be made general will mean destroying Aida's kin and perhaps even losing Aida's love. Rebuffed by Radamès in love, Amneris hides her sorrow while, at the same time, pretending deep friendship with Aida as she attempts to expose what she senses is a growing love between her and the general. Aida must hold nearly everything inside: her love of Radamès, her hatred of Amneris, the name of her father, even her own identity. Although all sing of their deep love for one another, because of buried secrets those loves are transformed into destruction, betrayal, and, ultimately, death.

     The numerous choruses of the Egyptian priests calling for war, vengeance, and punishment, although seemingly set apart from the deep loves of this trio, are psychologically played out by the three major figures of the opera. Each of these figures, in short, sweeps up the others into a kind of vortex that draws them into the void.

     By the final "real" entombment, strangely enough, Aida and Radamès are released. For the first time, hidden from all other eyes, they can openly show their love and, accordingly, are freed from the sorrows of their previously hidden lives. Amneris remains entrapped in life while feeling only death.   

 

Los Angeles, November 19, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog and USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2009).

George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Ira Gershwin | Porgy and Bess / 2020

it ain’t necessarily so

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Gershwin (music), DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin (libretto and lyrics, based on the fiction by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy) Porgy and Bess / Howard Fox and I attended the HD-Met Performance presentation on February 1, 2020.

 

What can you say about the great American opera, Porgy and Bess? Yes, there are some of the greatest Gershwin brothers’ songs which include “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing,” “I Loves You Bess,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” and “Oh, Lord, I’m On My Way”—“Who could Ask for Anything More”?

      Yet there is so much more to this opera, now finally redeemed by the new MET production I saw on an HD live performance with my husband Howard on Saturday, February 1, 2020, in a production so blessed that I can’t imagine why this “folk opera” was not previously perceived as one the most significant of US opera conceptions. It is definitely not a Broadway musical, at least the way I heard it this time round.

 

    

      And yes, we know this was a work is conceived by white boys and a woman, the original book being written by DuBose Heyward and his wife Dorothy (who deserves her own special tribute), and then reconceived by George and Ira Gershwin. And, we recognize, years later, that they translated their work into a South Carolina dialect and sometimes stereotypical behavior of the denizens of Catfish Row. Yet, this great operatic presentation asks us, straight-forwardly, to recognize its unintentional racist flaws and get over it. There were dialects that blacks spoke, at that time, different from white idioms of speech, and even if they aren’t quite rendered precisely by their white interpreters they do not necessarily demean their characters. American language is all about its distinctive idioms, which is also what makes it so lively.

      And no one who sees this opera can really proclaim that these figures are entirely stereotypes: in fact these characters, at least in this production, are amazing individuals, each in their own way suffering and challenging us to comprehend their particular identities in a manner that no previous US musical or opera performances had previously demanded.

      Clara (Golda Schultz) hushes her baby by declaring her own ascendency into the black community in which she resides:

 

Summertime,

And the livin' is easy

Fish are jumpin'

And the cotton is high

 

Your daddy's rich

And your mamma's good lookin'

So hush little baby

Don't you cry

 

      Her son, later adopted by Bess and then the entire community, will ascend eventually into this all-black world as a person able to “spread his wings.” The Gershwins, in short, made it clear from their first song, that this was not a closed community, but an expression of new possibilities. Catfish Row, although locked down each night, expressed the possibility of the new, of something outside of the racist world in which most of the opera’s figures, faced always with their mortality, knew also that their desolate community was stunningly alive, willing to create a new world outside of their limited confines.

      Beyond that the central characters, with George Gershwin’s remarkable soaring orchestrations which conductor David Robertson evinces from the always remarkable MET orchestra, help us to perceive that the drug-driven and highly abused Bess (the amazing Angel Blue) must, in order to survive, make the impossible decision to move away from both Crown (Alfred Walker) and the truly satanic figure of this opera, Sportin’ Life (a devilishly loveable Fredrick Ballentine).

     As much as she loves Porgy (the always engaging Eric Owens) and much as he loves his Bess, she is doomed by her own past. Another “crippled,” like Porgy, destroyed as an individual in this community—Porgy cannot quite save her, even if he successfully protects her from the brutal Crown’s attempts to reconnect her to a world of Eurydice and Hades (if there was ever a “them and us” world it is here in Catfish Row); they protect one another while still slightly being ostracized their own community members. The balance is nearly impossible; at one moment you are at home, the very next moment thrown out for you own natural proclivities.

      Bess is one of the most tragic figures in all of opera. She loves her Porgy but cannot truly escape the errors of her past. She is hated and loved in a community that would embrace her but, in the very next moment, which send her, as the last song proclaims, “on her way.”  This is, in fact, a story about community—all of our communities—which love us and hate us for our variances at the very same moment. The tragedy of this great opera—and in this production I did perceive it as a great opera—was that Bess, despite her love of Porgy, cannot get rid of her demons.       

 

     Porgy, in his last song, has to embrace them, presumably moving on New York City, to where drugs and Sportin’ Life has taken her, but also to where we know will also be his own death, “The Promised Land.”

     Of course, his reverse travel from South to North (I recall the impossible journey in Irving Reis’s The Big Street, wherein Henry Fonda moves Lucille Ball by wheelchair to Florida), will probably result in his “promised land” death. He will never recover his Eurydice surely, and if he might, he will obviously turn back to see her following him, resulting in her death again. The turning back to check whether she will or will not follow her is an expression of his inability to forgive. His journey to “the promised land” is a certain statement of his sorrow and breakdown.

      Porgy and Bess is as tragic as any European opera. Catfish Row is Venice, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and all the communities of the world that have witnessed tragic deaths of divas and their tenors, baritones, and even contra-tenors who loved them. Forget the dialect and the white writers and composers who created them. These are major statements of love and desire that remain eternally located in all of our imaginations. Porgy is always in love with his beautiful Bess no matter how we might reimagine them.

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2020).

 

William Finn and James Lapine | Falsettos / 2011

something bad is happening

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Finn (music and lyrics), William Finn and James Lapine (book) Falsettos / Third Street Theater, Los Angeles (the performance I saw was a matinee on Sunday, October 16, 2011)

 

There have been numerous revivals of William Finn’s operetta-like musical since its long 1992 run on Broadway (487 performances). Unlike most American musicals, Finn’s work, broken into two parts—March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland—has basically no spoken words, the story being told through the music and lyrics.

     Finn’s story, of the late 1970s and early 1980s in New York is almost a textbook of social issues and expression of correct attitudes towards its two major focuses, American Jews and gays, and for that reason the story was highly appreciated by its audiences (including the performance I attended) and, with its further introduction of AIDS, along with the difficulties the characters face with marital relationships—a young son being very much at the center of this work—it elicited more than its share of empathy resulting in tears (falling even from own eyes).

     The work begins with the main character, Marvin (Jesse Einstein), his son Jason (the talented young Major Curda), his psychiatrist Mendel (Chip Phillips) and his lover, Whizzer (Richard Hellstern) singing “Four Jews In a Room Bitching,” a piece laying out the difficulties each are facing. Marvin has left his wife, Trina (Lani Shipman) for Whizzer, but continues to insist upon a “tight-knit family,” demanding that both he and Whizzer continue to play an important role in Jason’s life.

   For her part, Trina is obviously hurt by the series of events, but still attempts to create a conciliatory relationship with her for husband and boyfriend. A trip to the psychiatrist, Mendel, however, creates a new series of events, as Mendel, singing “Love Is Blind,” attempts to help her while at the same time falling in love. When Mendel demands to know more about Marvin’s relationship with Whizzer, in “Marvin at the Psychiatrist, a Three-Part Mini-Opera” Marvin details his relationship with Whizzer, concluding that he is in love with him, Mendel moving the conversation to Trina’s bedroom habits, as Marvin and Jason reply in counterpoint.

    Jason, in turns out, is having his own difficulties, wondering whether his father’s homosexuality can be inherited (“My Father’s a Homo”).  Whizzer suggests that Jason also visit Mendel, who now is in what might be described as personal relationships with the entire family.

     Meanwhile, tension is building between Marvin and Whizzer, as the former attempts to put Whizzer in the position of homemaker. At the same time, Trina is increasingly feeling alienated by the situation, growing fearful that she is becoming less and less prominent in her family’s life (“I’m Breaking Down"). A visit from the psychiatrist for dinner and therapy results in further involvement between Mendel and Trina, and before long he has made a marriage proposal to Trina.

    Trina has mixed feelings which she expresses in “Trina’s Song,” but she realizes that Mendel’s love is sincere, and, in need of support, she realizes she could do worse. The men, all realizing their failures, together sing “The March of the Falsettos,” admitting that their roles as “masculine” examples represent a great deal of bluff.

     Trina and Mendel announce their marriage plans, and Marvin reacts with anger, violently slapping his ex-wife, both painfully singing “I Never Wanted to Love You,” a sentiment Whizzer repeats to Marvin, and Marvin relays even to his innocent son.

     By the end of the first part, Marvin has broken with Whizzer and created a gap between him and Trina. Attempting to salvage his connections with his son, he sings “Father to Son,” reassuring Jason that he will love always love him, however he turns out.

     If the first part has been almost brittle with the dilemmas Finn presents us with, the second part is even more distressing. It is now 1981, two years later. The cast has now grown by two others, lesbian neighbors of Marvin, Dr. Charlotte, an internist, and Cordelia, a kosher caterer. These two women offer support and love to the lonely Marvin, but create new problems of their own.

    Although Marvin has grown wiser (“About Time” being a song about growing up and getting over his selfish behavior), and has managed to retain a close relationship with Jason, the issue of his son’s Bar Mitzvah creates new tensions between Trina and him, she attempting to plan a large event, while Mendel (and Jason) encourage a simpler party. Caught in the middle, Jason is furious with both parents, which Mendel assures him is absolutely natural (“Everyone Hates His Parents").

    Both parents, Cordelia and Dr. Charlotte attend a baseball game in which Jason is playing, and in “The Ball Game,” all make fun of themselves for watching Jewish boys “who can’t play baseball,” and getting caught up in the event. To everyone’s surprise, Whizzer shows up—invited by Jason—which creates new tensions and reveals to Marvin just how much he has missed him.

     In the midst of these adult dilemmas, Jason somehow manages to hit the ball, but is so nonplussed that he forgets to run!

     Another “falsetto” piece relates their new traumas. And soon after Marvin and Whizzer return to their relationship. The war between Trina and Marvin, however, continues, until suddenly, in a racquetball game, Whizzer collapses, and is taken to the hospital. Dr. Charlotte has already warned us through song that “Something Bad Is Happening,” young men increasingly becoming ill and dying. And we soon discover that Whizzer has AIDS.

    In the trauma of the new situation, both parents offer Jason the option of “Canceling the Bar Mitzvah,” while all four of the gay figures, Marvin, Whizzer, Charlotte and Cordelia musically muse on how their love can last, “Unlikely Lovers.”

     As Whizzer’s condition worsens, Marvin turns to God, singing—a bit like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof—“Miracle of Judaism.” Suddenly all break into Whizzer’s hospital room, Jason having decided that the Bar Mitzvah should be celebrated there, with Cordelia catering the event. For a few happy moments, “The Bar Mitzvah,” lifts everyone’s spirits, but suddenly Whizzer can no longer continue in their company, and is wheeled from the celebrations.

     Left alone, Marvin sings his major love song of the work, “What Would I Do If You Had Not Been My Friend?” a piece which might melt away all the icebergs in Greenland, as we hear  the news that Whizzer has died.

    Marvin and his friends surround him to bid the audience farewell without another round of “Falsettoland.”

     Finn’s work is, as I mention above, often touching and certainly affecting. The audience with whom I saw the production, clearly loved the work. But the constant stereotypes of both Jewish and gay issues the musical presents often transform it from a serious dialogue of its concerns into a kind a saccharine and even sanctimonious affair. At their best the lyrics remind one of Stephen Sondheim, with their cleverly satiric purposefulness, but just as often they can’t hold up the significance they attempt to portray, and the music—never reaching the heights of Sondheim in works such as Follies, Merrily We Roll Along (which is closest in spirit to Finn’s work) or Sweeney Todd—seem all to be of one piece without creating the variance of sound and structure that would lend the musical a richer sheen.

     The cast I saw were all quite capable, at moments even wondrous, with the small musical combo on stage creating a feeling of a much larger cast than the work actually entails. Their acting also created a sense of absolute delight. So what, it’s not a perfect work? It certainly is worth a visit to the theater any night.

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2011

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (November 2011).

Alban Berg | Lulu / 2015

desire severed from reward

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alban Berg (libretto, based on Frank Wedekind’s Der Erdgeist and Die Büche der Pandora, and composer) Lulu / live HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York / the production I saw with Howard N. Fox and Pablo Capra was on November 21, 2015

 

The plays of Frank Wedekind, in their combination of naturalist issues and Expressionistic methods—despite their often somewhat clumsy plots and confusing character delineation—seem to be continually ahead of their times, finding major re-adaption within later theatrical conventions. The recent musical adaptions of his Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) of 1891, for example, reveal that the social-sexual issues of young adolescents at the turn of the 20th century have much in common with the problems of today’s 21st century youths.

    Similarly, composer Alban Berg found the perverse sexual and social actions of Wedekind’s two Lulu plays, Der Erdgeist (1895) and Die Büche der Pandora (1903) quite perfectly summed up the outrageous mores and extravagant behaviors of his Weimar Republic.

     Alas, because of the Nationalist Socialist rise and Berg’s early death, the opera was left unfinished in 1935, and would not receive its full three-act version, completed by Friedrich Cerha, until 1979.  But that fact, along with Berg’s innovative use of the musical twelve-tone system, has perhaps helped to make Berg’s version appear far more modern and ahead of its time than even G. W. Pabst’s credible and quite remarkable Weimer- period film, Pandora’s Box, of 1928, starring the unforgettable Louise Brooks (see My Year 2001).

      Today, with the India-ink projected images by artist William Kentridge and the consummate singing and acting skills of Marlis Petersen as Lulu (who has declared this as the last of her Lulu performances), the Metropolitan Opera production which my companion Howard and my editor Pablo Capra attended with me in a high definition live production—even while placing the work and very much establishing it as part of the years just prior to Hitler’s rise—seemed fresher than ever, as if Wedekind’s dialogue might be playing out in the headlines of today’s tabloids.

      Berg’s Brechtian prologue, his reorientation of the work to balance Lulu’s lesbian encounters with the series of male lovers whom she destroys, and his emphasis on the play’s clearly feminist themes (Pabst omits most of Lulu’s later relationship with Countess Gerschwitz [Susan Graham], and, accordingly, cuts her declaration that she will return to school and fight for women’s rights), along with his closer loyalty to the original plays throughout, which, although sometimes clutters up the landscape, nonetheless further modernizes the work, revealing the utter audacity of Wedekind’s originals.

    Berg, far more than Pabst, convinces us of Lulu’s immoral madness, revealing her unfeeling consummation of her lovers: her physician husband; her painter companion (Paul Groves); the newspaper owner Dr. Schön (Johan Reuter)— the only man she personally kills, and perhaps the only man she truly loves—Schön’s son Alwa (Daniel Brenna), and Countess Gerschwitz. Yet he also, more successfully than Pabst, shows us how Lulu, out of true love through the limited views of each of her lovers, is manipulated by them. The tragedy of this work, much as in Berlin Alexanderplatz, emanates from the reality of how much these figures use each other purely for their own needs, ending in a necessary bloodbath—which, on a far larger scale, is precisely what happened, of course, to the whole of Germany under Hitler’s control. The only major figure of this opera to survive is the man who may have fathered her and, more definitely, “created” her—through his lessons on how to survive as a prostitute-courtesan—is Schigolch (Franz Grundheber), who like Alexanderplatz’s Franz Bieberkopf survives only because he has become, by work’s end, utterly insignificant.

     Indeed, both Berg and Wedekind, more than Pabst, reveal that everyone in this tragedy, including Lulu, by the time of her death, has become meaningless. Each of them simply desires—revealed in Kentridge’s expressionist emblems such as Lulu’s and other characters’ donning of outsized white gloves—without offering much in return. Lulu’s world is one in which nearly everyone is seeking love, money, and fame without sacrificing themselves. In the end, only two characters actually are willing to give of themselves—and both of them are women.

     Countess Gerschwitz allows herself to be imprisoned in Lulu’s stead, and attempts to raise money to help her friend-lover to survive and to escape. And even after she is rejected endlessly by the object of her desire, she returns to Lulu’s hovel, only to be killed by the Jack the Ripper-like figure who destroys her after killing Lulu.

     Lulu, strangely enough, offers up not only her body, but is willing, at least in Schön’s case, to give up her heart; and ultimately, she prostitutes to save the starving Alwa and Schigolch.   

     Although the males of the tale strut the stage and destroy themselves out of what they describe as Lulu’s betrayals, they give nothing in return except financial support, which is always proffered as a transaction instead of presented as an outright gift. Although Lulu may pretend that some of her relationships have nothing to do with prostitution, in the society that Berg and Wedekind present, all human relationships seem to be built on transactional involvements. Even Gerschwitz hopes that her money might buy her love.

     In such a world, everything ends where it has begun, with someone demanding something from or swindling something from the other. Berg emphasizes this in not only through the predetermined musical structures of his twelve-tone system, but in the palindromic system of the work’s structural events. Not only are characters intentionally asked to portray others—Schön becomes Jack the Ripper, the Painter is the African Prince, etc.—but everything happens again and again. As if they were hamsters on a treadmill, the men Lulu encounters destroy themselves and each other like late 19th century dualists who fight for something that they do not truly control, but rather controls them. Berg makes clear that the society in which he lives—extending back even to Wedekind’s pre-World War drama—is doomed to destruction.

     If by opera’s end, Lulu has become a hag, of so little value in the thinking of her murderer, that she is better off dead, Lulu, unlike any other figure in the work—except perhaps for Gerschwitz—finally is willing to offer herself freely, without financial, societal, or even sexual ties. Human needs and desire have finally been severed from reward.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2015).