A Film Canon

Introduced by way of a sexual encounter that takes place beneath a table brimming with food, and concludes with an invitation to "eat my shit", Peter Shaffer and Milos Forman's Mozart (Tom Hulce) is, above all, a scatologist. As a result, his tension between baroque extravagance and classical elegance is understood as an audaciously candid stool sample of the society and body within which he finds himself, explaining the designation of The Marriage Of Figaro as a work of realism, and Don Giovanni as a work of confessional introspection. With a third act that revolves around the composition and performance of the Requiem, Mozart's contribution to opera and choral music is cemented as both proto-romantic and proto-cinematic, while his nemesis Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) comes to stand for aesthetic, political and religious conservatism, affirming Christ even as he rails against him.  It's this identification of Salieri with antiquated media that prevents the film being the apology for cinema, the insidious attempt to conflate highbrow and high concept, that it could have been. It also offsets Hulce's irritating performance of a role more suited to David Bowie, one of several contenders, who could surely have done more with Forman's mild steampunk palette. But it's ultimately Abraham's exquisite portrait of the agony of mediocrity that drives the narrative, aestheticising opera's intensity in terms of the abject humiliation inherent in any confrontation with genius. In particular, Mozart's comment that opera's uniqueness lies in its vocal deep-focus - the ability to hear "twenty people speaking at once" - is rotated ninety degrees, and transformed into a stereoscopic expansiveness that identifies cinema as the moment at which the ultimate spectacle of opera - a simultaneous vision of the performers and the conductor/composer's face - can be glimpsed, its cipher a two-face mask that remains the most unnerving image in the film.