Tonight if you can set your recorders, do so for Jules Dassin's
Rififi. It's a fantastic heist movie and I dare not say more for spoiling the rest of it. I was fortunate enough to see it in a movie theater last year.
Also of interest tonight, aside from a repeat of
Baby Doll, is the anthology film directed by Roberto Rossellini,
L'Amore, consisting of two stories called
Il Miracolo (
The Miracle) and
Una Voce Humana (
The Human Voice). The latter story is based on a Jean Cocteau play, and opera fans like me know that the Cocteau play was set by Francis Poulenc as
La Voix Humaine, an approximately 45-minute monodrama about a woman trying to salvage a romantic relationship over the telephone.
This year the Long Beach Opera is doing a performance of
La Voix Humaine, and I'm considering going, except that the
cheapest available seats are almost $70 with the handling fees. They chose to set the performance in a restaurant, rather than a proper performance space, so they're having to gouge the customers to get their money back. You'd think that with only 81 seats going per performance, they'd have chosen to stage something slightly more adventurous. Anyway, I'd already heard the Opéra national de Paris production with Barbara Hannigan (on a double bill with Bartók's
Duke Bluebeard's Castle with John Relyea and Ekaterina Gubanova), and that might be enough to satisfy me. Why should I pay through the nose to see an opera I'm not that fond of when I can stream a great live performance from France? From where I sit, Paris is a lot closer than Long Beach.