“Opera Meets Film” is a feature dedicated to exploring the way that opera has been employed in cinema. We will select a section or a film in its entirety, highlighting the impact that utilizing the operatic form or sections from an opera can alter our perception of a film that we are viewing. This week’s installment features Jean-Stéphane Bron.

Jean-Stéphane Bron’s “L’Opéra (or “The Paris Opera” in English)” is undeniably one of those immersive experiences that allows the viewer to feel that they are getting an exclusive behind the scenes look at something larger than life.

Or is it?

On the surface, one might feel like one is experiencing a tremendous amount in Bron’s film. And yet, very little of it is truly deep.

But that’s also a major part of the film’s brilliance. As you are watching it, you feel fully immersed. You feel like you are seeing EVERYTHING at the Paris Opera, even if at the end you come to realize how much was left on the surface.

But the reality is this – for mere Public Relations logic, it is likely that Bron was unable to portray many of the “juicier” moments in terms of conflict that is but hinted at throughout the film and would likely have added greater substance to segment portrayed.

Who knows how much material Bron truly had, but when there are such limitation, what is one to do?

The Setup

Bron’s strategy is the reason why the film works. He employs a number of cinematic tools to give the film a sense of scope and also explore certain tensions that he could only but glimpse at. While in retrospective the viewer may come away feeling like there was more that could have been developed, Bron’s choices of what to show (and how much) combined with the editing of the film, allow him to immerse the viewer in the experience without ever questioning the sense of exclusive access.

The opening of the film establishes the world of the story – it is the beginning of Stéphane Lissner’s tenure with the company 2015-16 season. Immediately a number of problems are mentioned regarding what he might have to endure. Union situations, a strange new production of “Moses und Aron,” the new ballet director Benjamin Millepied, etc. As you watch Lissner and his advisors bringing up these points, you already feel a number of major threads coming your way. This alone establishes a sense of anticipation for the viewer of what’s to come and how these issues may be resolved.

Then Bron starts to pull off his big magic trick through the use of cross-cutting, juxtaposing a number of parallel stories with one another in non-linear fashion.

One Story to Another

Besides just spending time with Lissner and his troubles, the viewer spends some time with Millepied and the Ballet. We spend some time with a young artist Mikhail Timoshenko as he arrives from a small town in Russia without any French proficiency. We see some of his struggles as he tries to make his mark, learn from Bryn Terfel, and ultimately end his story far more advanced than when we first saw him. In another segment, we follow high school students in a sub-division of the company as they prepare to put on a concert. Music Director Philippe Jordan is also glimpsed at other moments and a few international opera stars get extended cameo appearances. This all creates a sense of vastness.

The development of these narratives is explored through hints of tension (Timoshenko expresses his disappointment after a performance goes wrong, while the chorus complains about the staging for “Moses und Aron” and Jordan expresses his own worries about the chorus in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”), but the conflicts are never fully embraced and in some cases the resolution is not shown. However, the actual jumping from one narrative thread to another creates tension on its own – the suspense of what actually happens next with these as yet unresolved conflicts. When we return to the characters, Bron allows the viewer to intuit the outcome from the earlier thread, before embarking in a new direction. It’s a fantastic cinematic magic trick that allows for a sense of closure even if there was never truly development.

The validation of this technique is supported by some smaller subplots that do have complete arcs. Gerald Finley’s cancelation before the opening performance of “Die Meistersinger” gets a solid development. We see the baritone in rehearsal and the next time we hear about him is through a phone call confirming his withdrawal. From there, we see the mad scramble to find a suitable replacement and the story comes to a close with Michael Kupfer-Radecky saving the day. Within the context of the documentary, the satisfactory completion of this kind of arc, gives the other less developed ones, by association, their own sense of wholeness.

The Unexpected

Bron’s ability to give the viewer a feeling of exclusivity also comes from how he shows the “unexpected.” We see soprano Olga Peretyatko’s performance of “Rigoletto” from the perspective of an assistant holding her water bottle and later taking a picture on the artist’s phone. We see cleaning staff at the end of the film. We even get a segment that puts a spotlight on the bull brought into the production of “Moses und Aron.” We get to spot superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann in the zone during a rehearsal of “La Damnation de Faust” and then get extended time with Bryn Terfel. We also get tremendous glimpses of humor, particularly during a sequence in which Jordan repeatedly works with Toby Spence on pronouncing “wurst (sausage)” with more emphatic consonants. All of this adds supports the film’s sense of intricacy and behind-the-scenes excitement, even if you ultimately realize that a lot of it skims the surface.

Finally, Bron takes a cinema verité approach to the entire film, with the camera simply acting as observer without any commentary from any kind of narrator. With a narrator, the viewer is automatically given a sense of distance; someone else is telling us what to see and what to engage with. But with cinema verité, Bron is inviting the viewer to watch and observe on their own – they are the camera and no one else is acting as an interpreter or medium between the truth onscreen and the viewer. That alone adds to the sense of immersion.

Who knows the circumstances under which the film was made and the conditions – they likely played a key role in how Bron could approach the film. But the key here is that he worked out a strategy for how he was going to make the audience feel the way he wanted. And “L’Opéra” is ultimately a strong display of the illusion of cinema.