Opera Meets Film: How ‘Ombra Mai Fu’ Gives ‘Girl’ Emotional Closure & Context

By David Salazar

“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 we will take a look at “Girl.”

A year ago, we noted how “Ombra Mai Fu” was utilized as a “call for respect” in Sebastian Lelio’s “A Fantastic Woman.” In that film, the aria was ultimately a transcendent look at the beauty of nature in all beings, embodying the very text of the famed Handel piece.

In the aria, King Xerxes ponders the beauty of a favored tree, noting “Never was a shade of any plant dearer and more lovely, or more sweet.” The soothing nature of an aria such as this one can be the proverbial calm after the storm.

Lukas Dhont’s “Girl” purports a similar meaning, though it adds to the inner monologue of its main protagonist.

In “Girl,” Lara, a 15-year-old transgender girl, is preparing for sex reassignment surgery. She is currently enrolled in a heavily competitive ballet school, with the pressure of being at a certain level to retain her place with the institution. With her body in transition, she struggles with the day-to-day life of managing other people’s perceptions about her and her body. As her life becomes increasingly challenging and the operation is delayed, Lara ultimately opts for mutilating her penis on her own.

The after effects of the film’s climax are never revealed. All the viewer sees is Lara in a hospital bed with her father reaching out to her. How her decision to mutilate her private parts will affect her sex reassignment is not revealed to the viewer at all. The audience gets no sense of consequences, creating a great level of tension and potential confusion. What’s more, the complexity of the situation would require a great deal of expository narration from a doctor, not the ideal way to end any film. This would be necessary regardless of whether Lara has major consequences or whether she will ultimately be okay.

So Dhont comes up with a different solution for letting the audience that everything will be okay – “Ombra Mai Fu.”

As the film draws to a close, we see Lara walking down a street with Handel’s music playing beneath her. The smile on her face, coupled with the tender nature of the aria tells the audience everything it needs to know about the story’s conclusion. Together they combine to tell the viewer that Lara is going to be okay and probably better off than ever before.

But the choice of the aria itself cannot go unnoticed. As was the case with the close of “A Fantastic Woman,” here the aria becomes an embrace of the beauty in nature, specifically all kinds of people, regardless of their individual circumstances. Both films see the struggle of the transgender woman from different angles (Lara struggles internally more than anything else, while “A Fantastic Woman” looks at external rejection), but both champion a similar emotional empathy. Both leave their respective protagonists with a sense of grace bestowed by a newfound sense of self-love.

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