Scarlet diva
Puccini's Tosca makes Benoît Jacquot see red.

By Johnny Ray Huston

DIRECTOR BENOIT Jacquot's leap from Sade – his previous feature – to a filmed version of Tosca has a cool, cruel logic. Puccini may not be Sade-ian, but his sensibility is sadistic. Unlike Verdi, who is often declared the great humanist of Italian opera, Puccini seems to relish torturing his heroines: he slowly and methodically sticks fatalistic pins through the faithfulness of Butterfly (Pinkerton is the fall guy for the composer's anti-Americanism) and forces Manon Lescaut to trek through a desert toward doom. His chief creation, though – a woman of the theater, unafraid of getting some blood on her crimson gown – is Floria Tosca. When Tosca's villain, Scarpia, proclaims, "In the past I have burned with passion for the diva," he seems like a mouthpiece for the composer, whose blood thirst (and self-awareness) reaches its apex in the opera.

Tosca's commercial draw is provided by the pair cast as the title character and her lover, Mario Cavaradossi: Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna, the two-headed, soprano-tenor husband-wife entity whose recent relationship with New York's Metropolitan Opera reached Maria Callas-Rudolf Bing levels of acrimony during its brief life. In contrast, Jacquot almost joins the pair in an artistic threesome; privileging cinema over theatricality to a degree that is sometimes antidynamic, Tosca is dominated by shoulder-length close-ups that provide the visual equivalent of a lengthy embrace. Numerous dentist's-eye viewpoints reveal the status of Gheorghiu's and Alagna's teeth (hers: ordinary; his: bizarre) and map the taste buds on the tongue of Scarpia (Ruggero Raimondi). It's surprising to see such static camerawork from a director whose crossover film, 1995's A Single Girl, raced through hotel hallways with claustrophobic panic.

Framing the action so that characters emerge from and disappear into blackness like apparitions, Jacquot takes an austere approach, the opposite of the overdone opulence in Franco Zeffirelli's film of La Traviata. This minimalism isn't always served by Romain Winding's photography, which looks cheap in the digital-video sequences that Jacquot, in a gesture of dated postmodernity, uses to bookend the drama – grainy exterior shots (meant to approximate the imagination of a music lover listening to a recording, a redundant aim) and garish black-and-white studio-recording footage. The costume design provides fetishy details more suited to the opera's sexual violence. Tosca's second-act gown is an Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome shade of obscene red accented by four rubies that dangle from each of Gheorghiu's ears. Scarpia flicks holy water off fingers gloved in black leather.

Any recorded Tosca is taunted by the specter of Callas, and Gheorghiu's surface likenesses invite comparison. Along with Norma, Medea, and La Traviata's Violetta, Tosca was one of Callas's first-tier signature roles, and Victor De Sabata's ferociously conducted 1953 Tosca featuring her is widely considered one of the top five opera recordings of all time. The foreboding tones of Gheorghiu's lower register recall, if not quite match, the jolt of Callas's murderous curses. Her smaller voice (a liability rendered irrelevant in the studio) lacks the acid quality that makes Callas "unpleasant" to some listeners. But it doesn't deliver the convulsive thrills and chills found in the two incomplete visual documents of Callas's Tosca, 1958 and 1964 telecast stage performances of the opera's second act.

As an actress, Gheorghiu isn't as nuanced as the oft-filmed Teresa Stratas (who, admittedly, was too tiny for this role) or as vibrantly iconic as Callas, but she does possess a silent-film star's presence – an asset that suits Jacquot's close-ups. Of the principals, Raimondi is most successful; he brings a seductive, silver-haired quality to the menacing Scarpia, whether savoring the suffering of the captive Cavaradossi ("A ring of hooked iron at each temple so that blood spurts at each denial") or – his character's big moment – plotting to trap Tosca in the second-act opener, "Tosca e un buon falco!" In that sequence, conductor Antonio Pappano removes the tolling bells of De Sabata's famed recording, but strings soar like black wings to match the falcon imagery of the libretto. Elsewhere, though, church bells can be heard, and they signify more than an occasion for piety. A manipulator who "exploits the uses of religion as refinements for his licentious desires," Scarpia is all too relevant today, even if his tastes don't extend to this era's favorite Catholic appetizers.

Callas complained that, as composed, the role of Tosca seemed designed to wreak damage on a soprano's voice – too many "open" notes. (The untrammeled aspect of Tosca's singing makes it opera's closest relative to '50s- and '60s-era soul music.) This might have been Puccini's particular method for attacking divas, different in tactics and results from, say, the octave-scaling demands imposed by Bellini's Norma. In Tosca, Puccini reaches his trashy zenith, avoiding the slack passages of Madame Butterfly and La Bohème while simultaneously complicating and adding a spontaneous urgency to the pre-pop melodicism of both. Jacquot's film emphasizes that all of this opera's voices are ultimately Puccini's, carrying out a dialogue in which romantic impulses are entwined with, and ultimately snuffed out by, sadistic ones.

'Tosca' opens Fri/23, Opera Plaza, S.F. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.