‘I, Don Giovanni’ – Movie Review

I can’t stand being bored, and I rarely am. Left to my own devices, I can always find or create something absorbing to do.

I’m not sure what my extreme aversion to boredom is about. Shrink-think would have it that boredom is a surface manifestation of submerged anger. While this may not always be the case, it surely was last Tuesday evening as I suffered through Spanish director Carlos Saura’s I, Don Giovanni. Quite simply, this is THE most boring film I’ve endured since Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (or his unbearably tedious A Zed and Two Noughts -cheeRIST is there anything less tolerable than these Euro auteurs when they miss the mark…which is too fucking often!).

Not that there’s anything in common between unbearably precious and pretentious wanker Greenaway and Saura, except their capacity to torture people like me into a state of boredom-induced psychosis in a relatively short span of time. Saura had me shifting about and yawning uncontrollably within 30 minutes, mentally climbing the walls in an hour, and after that it’s all a bit of a haze. I suspect some sort of biochemical tripwire was activated in my dangerously pulsating brain, releasing a squirt of something stupefying that anesthetized me before I ran amok.

I overstate the extent of my derangement, of course. I think I’m trying to salvage some fun from the ghastly experience of being stuck in the middle of a packed aisle and unable to escape before the movie dragged to its end. I see now that my boredom phobia is a control issue. Aisle seats for me from now on.

I’ll be brief, and as positive as possible. This lavishly filmed three-legged mutant of a movie has a foot in theatre, another in opera and another in cinema, with its head simultaneously stuck up its arse. While this anatomical arrangement has inherent curiousity value, Saura’s great achievement is to have culled any remotely interesting element from the finished product. His success is due in no small part to the convoluted mess of a narrative, which purports to be the backstory of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and is impossible to follow for anyone who is not on bar-by-bar terms with the opera.

Now to the negatives. Nah, I jest. I’m not going to bother with anything more. On a rating of 5, this is a five-yawn movie. Avoid at all cost.

For other Boomtown Rap movie reviews, see Movie Review Archives

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