MEETING VENUS (1991) ***1/2 Sex, drugs, and opera. Fear and loathing in the finer opera houses of Europe. István Szabó and Michael Hirst have the ammo to conduct a brilliant decade long seminar in metaphor. I mean, you can't turn without engaging forty-two dialectics (some being distinctions without a difference): socialists and tsarists, workers and electricity, artists and bureaucrats, gays and junkies, drunks and abstinents, revolutionaries and Stalinists, unions and management, rain and media, aristocrats and singers, captains of industry and flunkies, terrorists and producers, environmentalists and terrorists, ego and ego, dance and maintenance, perennial American understudies and their love lives, giving birth and union leaders...just unending, nothing but brilliant, and served over the steaming Wagnerian Tannhäuser dialectic of Venus and Elisabeth (itself lifted from Nietzsche's Dionysius and Apollo, itself lifted from the playground gossip of Athens). In the middle of it all, in the midst of the maelstrom, Niels Arestrup is the eye of the hurricane itself, convincing as a conductor with his shit apparently together which, as any symphonian will assure you, is still another contradiction in terms. No less than Glenn Close (with a little help from Kiri Te Kanawa on the high notes) plays the yin to Niels' yang, polarized pole of a dichotomy immersed in cold and darkness that burns like a thousand suns. Hooray for art! Hooray for life! Yippee for taking chances! And get where you wanna be before the curtain comes down. Yet another argument, not incidentally, for making love your great quest, and then attending to secondary issues like food, water, paychecks, expression, and sensuality. This is why, my friends, artists are so preoccupied with the plight of the common man. Because we're all playing the big points. Because we're all soloing in the climactic scene. Because we've all got it in us to bring down the house.
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