Opera for The Inoperative

By RICHARD CORLISS

You don't have to love opera to like Aria. In fact, knowledge of music drama may prove a liability in appreciating this anthology of ten short films by ten prominent directors, each one spitballing on themes from the opera repertory. If, however, you are a connoisseur of rock videos, with their images like Day- Glo wallpaper after a food fight, you will feel right at home. Watching three of the segments (based on hit songs from Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino and Rigoletto), purists could sneer at Aria as MTV -- Movies Trash Verdi. But Producer Don Boyd and his crew want to revive the old music's passion and fun, not to mock its petrified conventions. And as often as not, the film succeeds. This is high culture dolled up as pop culture, aesthetics for the anesthetized, opera for the inoperative.

Half of Aria's episodes can be considered briefly and passed over, like the bacon bits at a sumptuous salad bar. The connecting sequence, by Bill Bryden, takes way too long to let John Hurt dress up as Pagliaccio. Charles Sturridge's essay for La Forza del Destino -- an urban mural of children's faces -- is all dour style, a Bugsy Malone in Nighttown. The Bruce Beresford segment, from Erich Korngold's Die tote Stadt, is content to watch two young people disrobe in an English mansion. Robert Altman had the inspiration to show a restless 17th century audience at Rameau's Les Boreades, then neglected to develop his night-at-the-opera sketch with any coherence. Derek Jarman's episode, to Charpentier's Louise, imagines an old diva taking a final curtain call, her mind garlanded with fading memories. Sweet but frail.

Now for the good stuff. Nicolas Roeg casts his wife, the exemplary Theresa Russell, as King Zog of Albania foiling a terrorist plot to the strains of Un Ballo in Maschera. Jean-Luc Godard sets Lully's Armide in a Paris gym. Body builders pump iron; two gorgeous sorceresses dust them off. Murder is in the air, and the kinetic poetry Godard can create from the way a woman's hair falls across her face. Julien Temple's witty episode -- quick gags and endless tracking shots -- plops Rigoletto into California's baroque Madonna Inn. A movie producer philanders in a room decorated in Late Neanderthal, while his wife dallies in Heidi's Hideaway, and an Elvis impersonator lip-syncs La donna e mobile. In another Western hotel, Tristan and Isolde execute a quickie marriage and a slow double suicide. Director Franc Roddam knows that Las Vegas and Liebestod were made for each other.

And Ken Russell was made for Aria. The music is Nessun dorma from Puccini's Turandot; the images are the last frenetic dreams of a dying woman. Ancient astral priests dress her for a mysterious ritual: paint on her body, diamonds on the soles of her feet, finally a branding iron pressed to her lips. A rude flash, and we see the scene of a car accident. The jewels are mortal wounds, the priests surgeons, the vision one of hope and fear for the unknown world that follows death. Visually, Russell's sequence is pitched at see above high- see. Emotionally, it takes preposterous risks and pulls them off.

For all its modern film style, Aria blends two old forms: classical opera and the silent film. Both discovered unique languages to convey emotions; both eschewed irony for intensity; both declined in the 1920s -- opera with Puccini's death, silent movies with the coming of sound. So a headlong romantic like Ken Russell will embrace opera on film like a first, lost love. For him, opera is performed at peak volume because the feelings it surveys are big and deep. Matters of lust and death are too important to be spoken; they must be sung, shouted, thundered, wept -- and shown, in all their delirious force. At its vagrant best, Aria reminds viewers of the original arithmetic of cinema: sight + sound = sensation.