Baryton (The Baritone)

Original post date: 21 May 1987
Rating: ✭✭✰✰

 It’s 1933 and a world-famous (but aging) opera singer is making a triumphant return to his nowhere home city in Poland. Accompanying him are his retinue, his coterie, his entourage of hangers-on, backers, groupies, and staff. His secretary Art (who looks like a reed thin Robert Duvall) is a schemer and manipulator who would put J.R. Ewing to shame. During the course of this movie there are double crosses, triple crosses, quadruple crosses, blackmail, seduction, cuckolding, spying, gossip, and other standard business practices. The issue is: who will be director of the baritone’s new opera in Strasbourg? The plots are so byzantine that it’s hilariously funny. It is clearly an allegory of the politics of the time. (It’s no coincidence that Art is an ethnic German.) And the finale where the baritone (who has lost his voice) must lip sync his long-awaited concert to one of his own recordings (with Art pulling the strings in the background) can’t help but put one in mind of Hitler and Hindenburg at the end of the Weimar republic. This is the first film by a young but obviously promising Polish director.

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