Dogs at the (Met?) Opera ; or, Sold a pup
Earlier today I went to see Dogs at the opera, and it turned out to be one of the most peculiar experiences I've ever had in a cinema, though I suspect I may have been the only person there who found it so.
DatO is an animation about a group of crafty canines, who reunite a ballerina working at the Metropolitan Opera in New York with her missing tiara, and find love along the way (in between trying to avoid the local dog warden), or so the promo would have you believe.
I love dogs, I love the opera. This, I thought, was going to be fun. Well, it was, but not quite in the way I was expecting.
So, when did I start to notice that something was not quite right? The script, let's admit it, wasn't good - my favourite line was the wonderfully mixed theatrical metaphor “I’m dancing Carmen in the play”. The voice acting was at first ok, except that opera was consistently pronounced Oprah, which seemed a little peculiar, and more an AI voice than your standard actor.
It then became even weirder. There was a quick look at an animated New York skyline, which seemed to feature the Empire State Building, but the audience at the ballet were wearing Edwardian dress (I had missed the beginning of the film and hadn't realised it was set in the first decade of the 20th century), but if set so early where had the Empire State Building sprung from? Sure, this was a children's film, and it may have been sloppy research, but it seemed odd.
And why did all the back streets look like early 20th century Prague or Krakow? I began to suspect that the film was made in Central or Eastern Europe, and was probably set there, and had been dubbed into English. I had mistakenly thought that it was New York. But no….
As soon as I had thought this there was another New York panorama, this time with a vivid Statue of Liberty. By now, I was completely confused.
A speech by Samson, the lead character also surprised me, as although gently done, it was a direct quote from Karl Marx. A bit of a throwback to social realist films, surely this couldn't be Russian?
So, on to the end credits. Always a source of fun. That Hollywood space station - filmed in Shepperton, a quick burst of applause for the LSO, or a London street actually in Dublin or even Babelsberg. This time the end credits produced a long list of Russian names, and no mention of where, or indeed when, the film was made.
A quick check on IMDB listed the film as being set not in New York but in Moscow. It turns out that is indeed where it was made, and originally set.
I've now found the original film online, and it gets ever more peculiar. The changes between the original version and the version as exported to the West are indeed odd.
There are obvious differences in the views of New York and Moscow, (oh, those onion domes). This is understandable.
But there are also strange changes within the story line, the dark haired, red tutu-ed Carmen of the Western adaptation…
…was originally a blonde Odette dancing Swan Lake…
The work that this must have involved is incredible, re-animating whole sections to change from Swan Lake (which I must admit is beautifully done in the original) to a rather clumsier Carmen (and why Carmen, I wonder, which I have rarely heard of being performed as a ballet).
Presumably it was to make sure that as much “Russianess” as possible could be removed so that it could be shown in the West without anyone noticing where it had originated. And widely shown it has been (you only need to look up trailers on YouTube to see the variety of languages into which it has been translated).
But this makes me distinctly uncomfortable. I love Russian literature and music. I'm not going to stop reading Dostoevsky or listening to Rachmaninov because of the invasion of Ukraine, but I don't want to support Russian industry under its current regime.
I miss the Bolshoi and the Marinsky touring, I miss hearing Russian orchestras and choirs (no-one plays Shostakovich like them, or has that incredible dark tone). Most of all I would have loved to have seen the most recent film adaptation of The Master and Margarita (my favourite book), which failed to get much in the way of cinema time in the West following the invasion (and which I would have, very sadly, boycotted).
I do sympathise with film makers, who are, after all, just doing their job, and are not necessarily responsible for the government they end up with, but I would have preferred the honesty of the original version to a version that pretends to be something it is not, even though I would probably have refrained from viewing it.
Having said that, would saying it was set in Moscow not New York made a difference at the box office? Outside Ukraine, I suspect not, most people would just see it as a family film, and indeed Dogs at the ballet would probably have been more appealing to many than Dogs at the opera.
I've always loved the technique of cinema. How what the audience sees is not what it is like in the studio. We know that 2001 is not filmed in space, and we willingly suspend our disbelief. DatO is an object lesson in the problems of suspending disbelief while trying to cater for a different audience. I can quite honestly say I've never seen anything quite like it.
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