Farinelli - Il Castrato Details

A bit superficial

A reasonable insight into the lives of the castrati, although the sexual side is rather over-emphasised. The main interest about the Castrati is the fact that they shaped opera composition for 150 years. There is evidence that they were revered in much the same way as pop stars are now, and that they were often persued by women, but this is all incidental to the effect they had on Baroque period music. This film as far as I know is the first to deal with the castrato, but the sexual side takes over too much. The notion that the Farinelli brothers shared lovers is absurd and has no grounding in historical fact. This is a pity because the same kind of false notoriety was built up around the poor Salieri when Amadeus was released. I suppose sex sells movies, but I would rather see something that is more true to fact.

[Highly rated reviewer]

History? Maybe

Actually I confess to watching this one mainly because I was impressed by Stefano Dionisi’s performance in Gloomy Sunday, where he is a totally different sort of musician, a moody 1930s piano player, but this film was a lot better than I expected. Dionisi’s performance as the famous castrato singer was very good, even to the point of looking as though he was singing the arias; the actor who played his somewhat manipulative brother, Enrico lo Verso, was also good. I haven’t seen him in any other films, but he’s worth looking out for.

Jeroen Krabbe as Handel was also believable, and very nasty. The music itself and the stage sets were magnificent, I can well believe that Farinelli was one of the pop stars of his day – just waiting for somebody to emulate him on the X Factor.

That said, the plot was in places quite bizarre, and I did find myself wondering how much of it was true. I'd much rather Gloomy Sunday, or for that matter Amadeus, but this is still a reasonably interesting film