Opera director Damiano Michieletto makes his underpowered cinema debut with Primavera, a well-meaning but ploddingly stately film that emerged in Italy last year. The movie is based on Tiziano Scarpa's prizewinning novel Stabat Mater, and it imagines a musically inspired affair between composer Antonio Vivaldi and a brilliant, beautiful teenage violinist.
A Lifeless Adaptation of a Novel
The film is set in Venice's Ospedale della Pietà, where Vivaldi tutors female orphans in music. Michele Riondino laboriously plays Vivaldi, who is always coughing into his handkerchief without delivering the piteous death expected on these occasions. Tecla Insolia plays the fictional Cecilia, one of the many demure orphan-girl musicians in their Handmaid's Tale outfits, playing for the simperingly bewigged great and good of Venice.
School-of-Salieri Backdrop
The whole film, with its lifeless staging, uninteresting performances, and laughably naive ending, can only be described as the school of Salieri. We hear fragments of music that are clearly supposed to be tantalising early drafts of the Four Seasons, evolving in Vivaldi's head. However, exasperatingly, we don't hear the inspirationally catchy masterpiece itself until the final credits.
Disaster Looms for Cecilia
Disaster looms as it looks as if Cecilia will be married off to a nobleman, which means no more music. But if she can somehow flunk the virginity test, Cecilia thinks she will be allowed to stay in the orphanage. This moment of raunchy jeopardy is prissily soft-pedalled by the film, and even the brutal violence that it causes passes off blandly. The movie then returns to its earnest and pious solemnity.
Primavera is in UK cinemas from 24 April. Last year's 300th anniversary of Vivaldi's Four Seasons passed with surprisingly little comment, although this film attempted to mark the occasion. The composer's affair with a teenage violinist serves as the central plot, but the adaptation feels lifeless and fails to capture the musical inspiration it seeks to portray.
