There's a number of different reactions that I can imagine a viewer could experience whilst watching this musical. My own was that of complete surrender to an intense and beautiful, if unlikely and dramatically heightened, story. But when a story is so stylised, when it is pushed as far to an extreme as possible, I feel that it can be permitted to go anywhere and twist *anything*. There is a line in Sondheim's PASSION goes, "Love that thinks everything is pure, everything is beautiful, everything is possible...," and this is precisely what we must understand before PASSION can make sense.
The score in itself could accompany a ballet, wordless, and still be beautiful, I think (and I'm no huge fan of ballet). The lyrics are so fitting and right that they add yet another layer. I saw this filmed production about a year ago for the first time, before I listened to the album... but since then, I've become used to just listening to the 70 minute condensed version. Watching this again today reminded me just how amazing Donna Murphy is as Fosca, how stylised the whole show is visually, and simply of the value of *seeing* a work *intended* to be seen as well as heard, something a lot of musical fans can easily forget when access to professional productions can be so hard and expensive.
Obviously there are those to whom this will not appeal. It asks you to believe in that entirely fictional kind of love, the kind that, if we ever *do* feel it, always feels false and embarrassing in retrospect. But Sondheim is better than any trash novel-writer and he deals with this ultimate extreme by pushing it even further so as to be so close to the ridiculous that it becomes something else entirely - the narrowminded might still laugh, but if you're prepared to risk going deeper, the investment is paid off. The actors in this production, particularly Donna Murphy, completely absorb themselves in their roles and truly give their all, the final scene between Fosca and Giorgio being perhaps one of the most intense, painful, and beautiful moments on the screen, merely from the exhausted, "hopelessly in love" expressions on both actors' faces. The movie is beautiful if you can find a way to let it in. You'll find yourself, in the end, seeing the movie's true beauty, repeating the movie's most profound line, "I don't know how I let you so far inside my mind, but there you are and there you will stay, how could I ever wish you away?"
