"If you like opera and bare breasts, here’s your movie. 

Ten segments made by ten different directors, all set to and inspired by different (and sometimes multiple) arias from eight different composers. You got all that? You’ll want a notepad for this one. I’m not going to go through every piece of music and each composer, or even the actors in each story, because it’s too much and you can click here for that. What I am going to do, however, is pass out awards for each director’s segments, in order of appearance:

Nicolas Roeg: most bonkers

Charles Sturridge: best understanding of how music movements should go with images

Jean-Luc Godard: most interesting to think about after the fact

Julien Temple: most vulgarly presented (depends on how you feel about pure farce, maybe)

Bruce Beresford: best use of nudity, Elizabeth Hurley edition

Robert Altman: best overall concept (his chapter shows an audience of poor madmen watching the opera being performed, but you are only watching the audience, very cool idea)

Franc Roddam: most forgettable

Ken Russell: most visually inspired and creative, also most gory

Derek Jarman: most heartfelt

Bill Bryden: this deserves a little bit better, as this is the glue that tries (the word “tries” is doing a lot of work there) to hold all this together. Each of the previous segments are led into by pieces of this, specifically by John Hurt, who puts on a great mute performance as “The Actor” throughout. So this should be recognized for best character work.

That’s some big names! Plus you’ve got Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Leoncavallo on the soundtrack, among others. And there is a young Tilda Swinton, Bridget Fonda in her first real movie role, and Theresa Russell in the cast. All sorts of names are attached to this one.

And, as mentioned before, there is a lot of nudity. I’m not mad about it, not at all, just saying. Only four of the ten segments don’t feature at least one actress in a state of undress, and one of those four is still happy to highlight Beverly D’Angelo’s ample cleavage. I wonder if that was part of the intended pitch: “See, what we’ll do is hit them with the big names and the naked women, and then we’ll get them hooked on opera!” I am amusing myself by thinking that the potential for that sentence to have been said in pre-production exists.

Even if it is an anthology film, there isn’t really a cohesive experience anywhere near this. And I’m not so sure this does a whole lot for opera, although the final title card makes clear that it meant to. It probably works best as a purely experimental film, with some famous folks getting to fiddle around however they see fit. That isn’t the worst idea ever, although the movie probably doesn’t play as well as it wanted to. But Aria is at least interesting, and that’s more than a lot of films can say." -Kai White, Letterboxd