Weiner -- Film Review Jenufa -- San Francisco Opera Performance -- Review Carmen -- San Francisco Opera Performance -- Review

Weiner

Directed by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg




This is not a documentary as it bills itself, but is rather a promotional infomercial for New York politician Anthony Weiner.  It is made like a home movie by people who were involved in his political campaign.  A very poor quality effort.  The film is self indulgent, masochistic, superficial, lacking in insight, and amounts to an orgy of American bad taste and cultural trash.  I didn't really want to see this film.  We had come to the theater expecting to see something else, but it happened to be sold out.  My friend wanted to see this, so I reluctantly agreed.  I knew this wasn't going to be any good, and I was right.  But it turned out to be much worse than I expected.  I was ready to leave after about twenty minutes. 


The film reduces American culture to its lowest common denominators and serves it up like fodder in a hog trough to provide some shallow titillation to the masses of ignorant morons who don't have lives of their own and who make up the bulk of our society.  American politicians do not understand the perversity of our sexual culture and accept it at face value.  They don't know how or why it got this crazy; they don't realize that it can change, that it can be different, and that it has been different in the past.  They are thus always being burned and bloodied by it.  They know it is ridiculous, but rather than challenge it, they simply try to exploit it to  their advantage while maintaining a pose of hypocritical self-righteousness on the one hand, and masochistic self-abasement on the other, if they happen to find themselves on the wrong end of it.   Weiner falls into the tradition of Bill Clinton, Elliott Spitzer, Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, John Edwards and many, many others.  I find it vacuous and rather boring.  It belongs on television.  
Jenufa

San Francisco Opera Performance

June 14, 2016




This opera is interesting and substantial in a number of respects.  First of all it deals with peasants in a rural setting in nineteenth century central Europe.  No one in this opera is distinguished or aristocratic or of great social significance.  Yet the story and the issues it raises are relevant to modern people far removed from the setting and circumstances in which the opera takes place.  The predicament of the unmarried, pregnant Jenufa is one that countless young women have found themselves in throughout history and to the present day. 

It is a little hard to grasp the relationships between the characters in this opera.  The three principals, Jenufa, Steva, and Laca, all call Grandmother Buryjovka, "Grandmother."  But Steva and Laca are step-brothers, not full brothers.  The Grandmother has favored Steva and rejected Laca all their lives, leaving Laca bitter and resentful toward Steva and toward women in general.  So these two men grew up together from boyhood in the same family, but did they have the same father, or different fathers?  Kostelnicka is Jenufa's stern, redoubtable step-mother, but she treats Jenufa as if she were her daughter.  She has been married to a relative of Steva (perhaps his father?) in a disastrous marriage which has left her bitter towards men and particularly toward Steva, the suitor of Jenufa.  So was Jenufa the daughter of Kostelnicka's husband by another woman, which would make her a half sister, or maybe cousin of Steva? 

It is interesting the way Janacek has obscured all of the relationships in this story by displacing them from direct blood relationships.  Everyone is undoubtedly related, but it is not clear exactly how.  In other words, traditional family relationships are obfuscated and somewhat disjointed in this story.  I concluded that the three principals, Jenufa, Steva, and Laca, must be first cousins, or half cousins. 

Compounding this ambiguity in the family relationships is the fact that there are no father figures in this opera.  The Mayor and the Foreman at the mill are not substantial enough.  Their roles are very peripheral.  This opera is dominated by three women:  Jenufa; her step-mother, Kostelnicka; and the Grandmother.  They, together with the Catholic culture that provides the social and philosophical context, are the source of all the pathos that is the subject material of the opera.  The major male figures are all wrecked and deteriorating at the hands of the women and the negative sexual ambience in which they are all trapped.  It is perhaps a comment on the impact that a dearth of strong adult male figures has on young men, and a further, perhaps less direct, comment on the impact of war on the lives of boys.  The draft, which was the initial worry of Steva, takes the adult men away from their families and communities -- possibly permanently -- and leaves the rearing of the children, particularly boys, to women.  This opera seems to take an unfavorable view of this.

The opera can be seen as a trenchant repudiation of the pervasive Catholic domination of the cultural mindset.  In every case where homage is paid to Catholic beliefs and practice, it is immediately ripped asunder and trampled.  In the first act pregnant Jenufa prays that God will prevail upon Steva to marry her and solve this impending scandal that will inevitably break upon her and which is keeping her awake every night.  Steva arrives, but he is far from an answer to her prayers.  In the second act Jenufa prays again to the Virgin Mary to protect her baby and return him safely to her.  This is answered with the news that the baby is dead.  In the third act Laca and Jenufa are married in a very solemn Catholic ceremony presided over by the grandmother.  This is immediately trashed by the news that Jenufa's dead baby has been found; Jenufa is threatened with stoning, and Steva's new wife, Karolka, demands a divorce.  In every case where the allegiance of the hearts and minds of the people to Catholic values and attitudes is demonstrated, it is immediately mocked by events and nullified.  I think the opera understands that the root of the emotional carnage in the lives of these people is directly related to the overbearing Catholic Christian ideology which structures their outlook on themselves, their lives, and their interpersonal relations.   This is also consistent with the character of Kostelnicka, who is a sacristan in the Catholic Church and the incarnation of stern, austere Catholic sexual morality.  She becomes the villain who kills Jenufa's "illegitimate" baby, and in the end is led away by the villagers to an unspecified punishment, possibly stoning.  Everything associated with the Church in this opera ends up being negatively construed and decisively repudiated. 

The problematic aspect of this opera is the third act.  This is where all of these deep seated hatreds, longings, rivalries and animosities purport to be resolved more or less favorably.  I don't think it works and I don't think it is credible given what has gone on in the first two acts.  Can these leopards all change their spots so easily?
I am particularly skeptical of the pending marriage between Laca and Jenufa, which pretends to end the opera on a very tenuous note of hope and good will.  This is a guy who harbors deep seated bitterness and longing toward women, lifelong resentment of his older step-brother, who was apparently treated more favorably by the women whose favor and love he had so painfully sought.  His rage was of such magnitude that he slashed the face of the woman he claimed to "love" with a knife.  Now we put him in a suit and he is transformed into Ward Cleaver?  I just don't know . . . 

Jenufa does not have a very good track record of choosing lovers, and her judgment in yielding consent to marry Laca is also highly questionable.  Maybe it is an act of despair on her part.  Maybe she just doesn't care anymore.  Maybe she knows he will eventually kill her and she is going into it with that expectation and hope.  There is a hint in that direction.  Jenufa is dressed in black for her own wedding and the mayor's wife remarks on her attire being more suited to a funeral than a wedding.  That idea should be developed.  I think the third act should be rewritten and it should take on a much more sinister quality.  It should be made clear that Jenufa, in choosing to marry Laca, is knowingly and willfully choosing her own destruction, and Laca's supposed transformation is at best shallow, and his underlying evil nature should be more accentuated.  This would make the characters more consistent with their development through the rest of the opera. 

The character of Laca offers some insight into men who commit extreme violence toward women.  It should be understood as not just the inability to manage anger, but rather a culmination of rage that has accumulated over a long period of time and started very early in the lives of these young boys.  They are boys who sought love, attention, affection, care from women who rejected them, spurned them, and were cruel to them.  Not just once, but continually throughout their growing up.  The accumulated rage is visited upon the women who have the misfortune to become involved with them as adults.  This opera makes that connection very well.  In the first act Laca reproaches the Grandmother for withholding the love and care that he long sought from her, while watching her bestow all of her attention on his rival, Steva.  But apparently she did not love Steva well either because he became a grandiose, irresponsible, destructive alcoholic.  Both men destroyed by bad love from a flawed woman.  Not good prospects for marriage. 

Steva's rambunctiousness and irresponsibility can be seen as rebellion and protest against this triangle of overbearing women.  I felt he showed some strength and character in refusing to be bullied into a marriage to Jenufa, which he knew would be a disaster, in spite of her being pregnant.  His behavior with Jenufa is a stinging rebuke to all three of the women who have overshadowed his life.  It is a fierce rebellion, but his marriage to Karolka does not prove to be an escape route for him.  Karolka's mind has been poisoned by the same Catholic attitudes toward sex that afflicted the women he grew up with.  She ultimately turns on him and rejects him like the others, leaving him with his rage and his alcohol. 


The music is superb and well suited to the action on the stage.  This is one of the better operas I have seen.  It is dramatic, profound, and complex,   Go see it.  It's fantastic.  
Carmen

San Francisco Opera Performance

May 31, 2016





This opera has very little substance.  The characters are shallow and lack psychological complexity.  One gleans no insight from this story and it carries some racist overtones.  Carmen is a volatile, immature, self-centered, imperious, manipulative, narcissistic, extremely unattractive woman.  Don Jose is a hapless, foolhardy, weak, patsy, who falls for Carmen.  He is engaged to the uninteresting, pathetic Micaela who represents his tie to this mother.  She is always reminding him of his mother's ailing condition and that he must disrupt his life and go to her, and pressures him with guilt to keep him bound to herself and his mother.  Don Jose in falling for Carmen is attempting to break free from this suffocating tie.  But it is a bad choice, and he remains trapped in this unpromising attachment to their mutual destruction.  It is hard to feel sorry at the end of this tragedy.  One feels that a cluster bomb might have been more suitable. 

They saved money on sets.  I would call the staging "contemporary minimal."  They probably didn't even need a set designer.  They spent the money instead on large choral ensembles of soldiers and children and incidental extras.  I couldn't figure out what all these children were doing in this.  It was hard to discern the time period in which this was supposed to be taking place.  There were cars that looked to be from the 1980s, lawn chairs, camping coolers and a couple taking a selfie of themselves with a small digital camera that suggested a very modern era, yet the soldiers' uniforms seemed to suggest fascist armies from the 1930s.  And what were the soldiers doing in this anyway?  The ambiguous context did not support the need for soldiers.  For the most part, the actors wore their street clothes, which further obscured a fixed time period and also enabled them to save money on costumes.  I think this confused jumble of stage props and a lack of clear definition of time and place reflects the director's lack of a clear conception of what to do with this opera.  Trying to save this opera by obliterating everything except these poorly drawn characters and the story line that lacks a core coherence only underlines the mediocrity of this opera.   

The opera first premiered in 1875 in Paris to poor reviews.  The composer Georges Bizet was crushed by the bad reception and died a few months later at the young age of 36.  Bizet's unfortunate demise, however, does not improve the opera.  If there is any lesson that can be taken away from his personal tragedy it is the need to be resilient and to bounce back from failure, rather than letting it destroy one. 
The music has some catchy, memorable tunes, and probably provides the sole reason for the continued popularity of this opera, but they are light and somewhat playful and do not set a proper mood for this misguided tragedy.  I would not regard Bizet as a composer of great stature. 

Carmen is a gypsy.  This, from the outset, defines her "otherness," which would have been immediately grasped by a contemporary audience from nineteenth century Paris. Gypsies, or Roma, have been a persecuted minority in Europe for seven centuries and have been kept at the bottom of society by discrimination and marginalization to this very day.  Bizet, by incarnating Carmen as a member of this despised minority, is disavowing her character and affirming a negative stereotype of her people.  He is setting her up, inviting the audience to view her with aspersion, which the 19th century Parisian audience did, and then he kills her off, which is both a judgment on Carmen and on the people she represents.  So the opera has a racist quality to it as well as a conservatism that upholds the superiority of French values, culture, and sensibilities. 

The strongest performance in this production, I would say, was given by Michael Sumuel, who played the matador, Escamillo. 

The production does not have a lot to offer.  It was an attempt to infuse some life into something that never had much viability to begin with.