Farinelli (1994)

Director:

Gérard Corbiau

Writers:

Marcel Beaulieu (writer)
Andrée Corbiau (writer)

Release Date:

17 March 1995 (USA)

Genre:

Biography | Drama | Music

Tagline:

Où s'arrête le pouvoir de sa voix?

Plot:

Farinelli, is the artistic name of Carlo Broschi, a young singer in Handel's time. He was castrated in his childhood in order to preserve his voice...

Plot Keywords:

Singer | Opera | Suicide | Threesome | Mediocrity

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 5 wins & 2 nominations

Cast

Stefano Dionisi	...	Carlo Broschi (Farinelli)
Enrico Lo Verso	...	Riccardo Broschi
Elsa Zylberstein	...	Alexandra
Jeroen Krabbé	...	George Frideric Handel
Caroline Cellier	...	Margareth Hunter
Renaud du Peloux de Saint Romain	...	Benedict
Omero Antonutti	...	Nicola Porpora
Marianne Basler	...	Countess Mauer
Pier Paolo Capponi	...	Broschi
Graham Valentine	...	Prince of Wales
Jacques Boudet	...	Felipe V
Delphine Zentout	...	Young admirer
Richard Reeves
Jonathan Fox
Jo Betzing		(as Josef Betzing)

Also Known As:

Farinelli (International: English title)
Farinelli voce regina (Italy) (alternative title)
Farinelli, il castrato (France)

MPAA:

Rated R for depiction of adult themes and sexuality.

Runtime:

111 min

Country:

Belgium | France | Italy | USA

Language:

French | Italian

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Iceland:L | Canada:14+ (Ontario) | South Korea:18 | Argentina:16 | Australia:M | Chile:18 | Finland:K-12 | Germany:12 (w) | Peru:14 | Portugal:M/12 | Spain:13 | Sweden:11 | UK:15 | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Bayreuth, Bavaria, Germany

Company:

K2 SA

Trivia:

Both male and female voices were combined to create the sound of Farinelli's singing voice. The male voice was Derek Lee Ragin, a British countertenor and the female Ewa Małas-Godlewska, a Polish mezzo-soprano.

Movie Connections:

Featured in The 52nd Annual Golden Globe Awards (1995) (TV)

Good yarn, great music, rotten history

Farinelli is not nearly as awful as I feared it would be. It's similar in many ways to Amadeus. Like Amadeus, it has glorious music beautifully performed. Like Amadeus, it tells a good (if melodramatic) story. Like Amadeus, it has a marvelous period feel. Like Amadeus, the characters in this story have the names and occupations of real people, but their portrayal on the screen is not even caricature: a caricature necessarily starts with something recognizeable.

Farinelli was famous in history not merely for a phenomenal voice and outstanding musicianship and musical connoisseurship, but for poise, dignity, and perfect-pitch judgement of human character; he is portrayed throughout as a hysteric. Handel is shown as a pompous, bullying nervous wreck verging on the psychotic, quite at variance with all reliable accounts of his humor, sturdiness, practicality, and reputation for scrupulous probity toward his musicians and singers.

Handel could not have said, to Farinelli, during the latter's first sensational season with the Opera of the Nobility, that he would never write another opera, and not just because Handel was no faux-Freudian opera queen: Lady History inconveniently discloses that after that 1733-34 season Handel composed and presented Ariodante, Alcina, Atalanta, Giustino, Arminio, Berenice, Faramondo, Serse, and Imeneo; his last opera, Deidamia, went unperformed, but several in that list were significant successes, and some were revived more than once.

The two rival opera companies in London went down the drain more or less simultaneously, notwithstanding the enormous draw of Farinelli for the Nobility company, and notwithstanding the high quality of the music of its principal composers (Porpora, Hasse, undervalued today) and the stupendous quality of Handel's music (also undervalued); rather, the people with the money to afford the (by our standards) enormous ticket prices had simply lost interest.

One commentator here is skeptical about many "period" details. And rightly: for starters, that's not the way boys were castrated, but you don't need to know the truth. Relax, just enjoy the music and the costumes and the actors chewing the scenery.