Lucia
UK 1998
Reviewed by Nick Kimberley
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Scotland, the present. Kate and Hamish Ashton, brother and sister, are opera singers. Their ancestral home needs money spent on it to keep it from falling into complete disrepair. Hamish has engineered a liaison between Kate and the American tenor Oliver Hickox, in the hope that Oliver's money will save the house. To celebrate Kate and Oliver's imminent marriage, Hamish plans to stage Donizetti's opera Lucia Di Lammermoor in their home. Kate, Oliver and Hamish will take part, but it soon emerges that Kate is really in love with Sam Ravenswood, another singer.
Kate's real situation begins more and more to resemble Lucia's in the opera: like Lucia, she has been bullied by an overbearing brother into a loveless marriage, while her true love continues to preoccupy her. Each singer takes a part in the opera that corresponds to their role in real life. Aware that it is Lucia's fate to commit murder and go mad, Kate begins to feel unsure of her grasp on sanity. Sam performs in Lucia Di Lammermoor in Edinburgh. He is a tremendous success, and when a newspaper publishes a photo of Sam and his 'other' Lucia, Kate's anguish increases. Oliver's parents arrive by helicopter for the wedding performance, but when Kate appears for Lucia's mad scene, it is clear that the blood on her dress is all too real: she has followed Lucia's example and stabbed her husband-to-be.
Review
As advertisers well realise, opera on the soundtrack can do all sorts of things for a film. It can add a touch of class by association, or its purportedly ludicrous narratives can provide an ironic counterpoint to whatever the film's story happens to be. Or it can provide an aural analogue of the febrile state of mind of the movie's characters. In Lucia, it serves all three functions while also delivering a ready-made supply of great tunes for the audience to hum as they leave the cinema. Don Boyd, director of Lucia, produced Aria, a 1987 anthology of shorts in which several directors (including Jean-Luc Godard, Ken Russell, Nic Roeg and Robert Altman) responded cinematically to individual arias. Aria was an engaging novelty, but it treated opera as no more than a sequence of hit tunes that worked best when dragged, shouting and screaming, from their dramatic context. It is to the credit of Lucia that, while it is happy to get what it can (music, narrative infrastructure, locations) from its association with Donizetti's opera, it also takes its operatic narrative seriously as a coherent way of telling a story (which is not always a rational way). The film even acknowledges a debt to Walter Scott's original novel The Bride of Lammermoor, but that's something of a red herring: it's the opera that matters here.
Problems arise in the attempt to make that narrative a literal counterpart of a more or less naturalistic story of modern thwarted love. So we're required to believe that Kate, an apparently strong-willed opera singer, might allow her admittedly large brother to bully her into a marriage she doesn't want. This really is the stuff of nineteenth-century Romantic fiction which, like Donizetti's opera, had supporting structures of metaphor and analogy that are not available to contemporary storytelling. No doubt aware of that, Lucia fills the screen with grainy low-budget imagery that becomes a tongue-in-cheek gloss on the story. So candles gutter and winds moan while a dashing young man races around the Borders on his motorbike and a sad young woman pines prettily.
The sum effect is engaging without being emotionally involving. I cared not a jot whether Kate/Lucia got her man, just as long as she burst into song every now and again. Commendably, Boyd got all the singers to perform live on set, rather than to mime to playback. His Lucia is played by his daughter Amanda Boyd, a promising singer whose voice proves a little thin at this stage in her career to stand the combined scrutiny of camera and microphone in very close attendance. She does, however, 'do wistful' rather well. Of the other actor-singers, the most impressive is Mark Holland, a craggy giant of a man who looks and sounds positively sulphurous. His larger-than-life performance catches the mood of happy hokum that the film needs in order not to take itself too seriously.
Credits
- Producers
- Stephanie Mills
- Alison Kerr
- Screenplay
- Don Boyd
- Inspired by Sir Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor and Gaetano Donizetti's opera Lucia Di Lammermoor
- Director of Photography
- Dewald Aukema
- Editor
- Adam Ross
- Contemporary Music
- Kiran Shiva Akal
- ©Lexington Films Ltd.
- Production Company
- LFL - Lexington Films
- Executive Producer
- Henry Herbert
- Gosford Representative
- Patrick Marr
- Pre-production Co-ordinator
- Adam Black
- Production Co-ordinator
- Nicole Haeusser
- Location Manager
- Tracey Fearnehough
- Post-production Supervisor
- Dorthe Gude
- Assistant Directors
- Crispin Buxton
- Ted Mitchell
- Tim Bain
- Script Supervisor
- Lucy Enfield
- Casting
- Non-singers:
- Ros Hubbard
- John Hubbard
- Lighting Design
- Performance:
- Simon Mills
- 2nd Camera Operator
- Grant Cameron
- Steadicam Operator
- Vincent McGahon
- On-line Editors
- Soren Lennert
- Clive Pearson
- Production Designer
- Robert Innes Hopkins
- Co-art Directors
- Mike Gunn
- Giles Cadle
- Costume Designer
- Clare Mitchell
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Tracey Klein
- Make-up/Hair Designer
- Elisa Johnson
- Additional Music
- Brian Gascoigne
- Musical Director
- Mark Shanahan
- Conductor
- London Studio:
- Mark Shanahan
- Choir Manager
- Peter Broadbent
- Music Editor
- Matt Collinge
- Soundtrack Recording Engineer
- Mike Ross Trevor
- Music Co-producer/ Engineer
- New York:
- Frederick Jorio
Music Consultant- Michael Berkeley
- Choreography
- Jonathan Lunn
- Sound Recordist
- Lucy Pickering
- Dubbing Mixer
- Tony Anscombe
- Sound Editor
- Roger Dobson
- Opera Consultant
- Phyllida Lloyd
- Digital Technology Consultant
- Brian Rose
- Sound Advisers
- Matthew Dilley
- Peter Knowles
- Richard Reynolds
- Singing Coaches
- Elizabeth Vaughan
- Arlene Randazzo
- Mark Shanahan
- Graphics Consultant
- Bo Heidelberg
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Michael Scott Law
- Horses
- Murray Bain
- Brenda Bain
- Helicopters
- Lothian Helicopters
- Cast
- Ann Taylor
- Alice 'Alisa'
- John Daszak
- Norman 'Normanno'
- Andrew Greenan
- Raymond 'Raimondo'
- John Osborn
- Oliver Hickox, 'Arturo'
- Mark Holland
- Hamish Ashton, 'Enrico'
- Amanda Boyd
- Kate Ashton, 'Lucia'
- Richard Coxon
- Sam Ravenswood, 'Edgardo'
- MarkShanahan
- conductor, London Studio
- The Joyful Company of Singers
- chorus
- Jimmy Logan
- Presbyterian minister
- Lesley Ann Sammons
- repetiteur 'accompanyist'
- F. Ran Shiva Akal
- designer
- Vincent Marzello
- Mr Hickox
- Rosie Hall
- Mrs Hickox
- Sarah Pritchard
- assistant stage manager
- Bill Boyd
- Lord Ravenswood
- Chantelle Duncan
- Rumanian diva
- Raymond Binnie
- policeman
- Ben Cole
- paparazzi
- Anna Pons Carrera
- dream dancer
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Telescope Pictures Ltd.
- 9,199 feet
- 102 minutes 13 seconds
- In Colour