EIFF: Bel Canto serves palatable pablum
Bel Canto, starring Julianne Moore and Christopher Lambert, is a historically revisionist melodrama so loosely based on the 1996 Peruvian Japanese Embassy Hostage Crisis that actual Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was renamed President Masuda in the film.
That should tell you how close this one sticks to the facts.
To be honest, it’s more directly based on Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel of the same name, so let’s direct the spotlight for cooking this one up her way. You’ve likely already learned the incident was a bloodbath and all the insurrectionists were killed by Peruvian government militia. Because that’s a story more suited for Sly or Arnie – not Moore, one of the most accomplished dramatic leads of the last 25 years – director Paul Weitz takes his direction straight out of the book, and down a significantly more viewer-friendly road. You know, the one with people falling in love, where people from opposite sides of the tracks – in this case, mostly upper crust privileged white folk juxtaposed with mostly illiterate anti-government South American revolutionaries. The couple discovers wonderfully life-affirming things like their common humanity, in order to mush the reality of the horrible real life story into a palatable fictional pablum for mass consumption. Like I said, blame Ann.
This film has not hit wide release yet, so what remains to be seen is whether audiences are going to want to open up and say aahhhh to this oh-so-Hollywood film. Given the hostage-taking and its subsequent shockingly violent resolution are the ONLY similarities between the real story and this one, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to plunk down $15 to see what goes on between beginning and end – if you haven’t read the book, of course. For those who need a little more intel, what you’re getting with Bel Canto is straight out of Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves notebook. While many years ago in a different form, trust me, you’ve seen this movie before.
Like so many other novels, the story may have worked in prose form, but on film it just doesn’t fly.
Bel Canto screens Oct. 1 at 9 pm as part of the Edmonton International Film Festival.
