Deborah Ross

Guns, Puccini and sex in the china cupboard

This adaptation is functional, methodical and one-note – and any scene that Julianne Moore isn’t in flops

Bel Canto is an adaptation of the Ann Patchett novel first published in 2001, which I remembered as being brilliant and unputdownable, even if I recalled only a few of the details — hostages, an opera singer; that was about it. So I found it on the bookshelf and read it again, which was daft. The book is brilliant (and unputdownable) and now I can’t come to the film without comparing them, which is unfair and not helpful. But I’m going to say it anyway: this isn’t as good as the book. Not nearly.

Patchett’s novel was inspired by the Peruvian hostage crisis of 1996, when members of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement kidnapped a group of high-level diplomats, government and business people who had gathered for a party at the Japanese ambassador’s official residence in Lima. But what this narrative lacked, Patchett must have thought, is an opera singer, which isn’t unreasonable, as what situation wouldn’t be substantially enlivened by having an opera singer in its mix?

So here we have world-famous soprano Roxane Coss (Julianne Moore) accepting an invitation to sing at an exclusive party in some Latin American country (it is never named). The party is being held in the vice-president’s palatial mansion and Coss has been paid her huge fee in an attempt to woo Japanese businessman Katsumi Hosokawa (Ken Watanabe), who is an opera fanatic and may invest in the country, or so the officials hope. But as Coss sings her final aria of the night — Moore lip synchs to Renée Fleming — the lights in the mansion flicker, then die, and the terrorists burst in. Is this moment electrifying? Not especially, but, fair play, it might have been had I not just (stupidly) reread the book.

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