BEL CANTO: A Tedious Hostage Drama

The hostage drama. The Taking Of Pelham 123. The Negotiator. Inside Man. Dog Day Afternoon. Die Hard. Speed. Captain Phillips. A Hijacking. It’s a genre known for tense stand-offs. Edge-of-your-seat rescue attempts. Life or death decisions. A genre designed to make you hold your breath. To gasp. To bite your nails in terror.

Well, usually. One hostage drama is more likely to make you yawn than gasp. It’s called Bel Canto.

Bel Canto

World-renowned opera singer Roxanne Coss (Julianne Moore) accepts an invitation to Japanese businessman Katsumi Hosokawa’s (Ken Watanabe) birthday party. The party takes place in an unnamed Latin American country, where Hosokawa is considering building a new factory. It’s an extravagant, exclusive affair, the invitees including the country’s president. He declines the invite, however, opting instead to stay home and watch his favourite telenovelas.

All is going well – the guests schmoozing, Roxanne singing – until a group of armed rebels storm the party, demanding to know where the president is. When they learn he isn’t there, the guerrillas decide to hold the guests hostage, only releasing them once they have been given the president in return.

The stand-off takes weeks. As the time wears on, the captors and the hostages start becoming close. Friendships and romances blossom; what began as a hostage situation becomes something approaching idyllic. But with a trigger-happy government watching their every move, this unlikely paradise is operating on borrowed time…

A Global Cast

Probably the most interesting thing about Bel Canto is the eclectic, globe-spanning cast. You have American Julianne Moore as the lead, with countrywoman Renée Fleming providing her singing voice. Japanese legend Ken Watanabe plays her love interest, and German Sebastian Koch is the hostage negotiator. There are Scandinavian hostages and Latin American guerrillas; it’s rare to see such a genuinely expansive, diverse cast.

What a shame then that they are so poorly used. In adapting Ann Patchett‘s popular 2001 novel of the same name, screenwriters Paul Weitz and Anthony Weintraub struggle to manage the vast roster of dramatis personae. Besides Roxanne, who gets something resembling a character arc as she sheds her primadonna attitude and bonds with the rest of the captives, no one has more than one trait. All there is to Hosokawa is his love for Roxanne. All there is to guerrilla Cesar (Ethan Simpson) is his desire to learn to sing. Though the cast may be expansive, each member is only allowed only one note.

Then you have poor old Sebastian Koch, who isn’t even gifted one attribute. He is the hostage negotiator, and that is it. Even the most two-dimensional of movie characters are typically allowed a distinguishing feature; it’s oddly fascinating to witness someone with nothing about them whatsoever. To give that character to an actor as capable as Koch is a criminal waste. He’s clearly trying, but there’s only so much anyone could do with a role that thin. It’s a wonder he accepted the part in the first place.

Having an international cast does create some problems. Thanks to the language barrier, most of the interaction has to be through a translator (Ryô Kase). Weitz and Weintraub never quite figure out how to use him dramatically; more often than not, these translated conversations are belaboured and boring.

Even when the characters speak to each other directly, the encounters suffer a stiffness made worse by pedestrian dialogue. The screenplay is rife with clichés; during the more heated moments of the hostage taking, the film is full of ardent exclamations: “No one has to die!”, “If there is blood, it will be on their hands”. Of course, there is a diabetic amongst the hostages – it seems there must always be at least one diabetic or asthmatic in any group of captives.

Between the clichés in both the plot and the dialogue, and the difficulties with the language barrier, it’s hard to find one natural, easy conversation in the whole movie.

Tedium. And Then…

Bel Canto is strangely paced. Whilst it is a hostage drama, a genre known for suspenseful stand-offs and nerve-shredding rescue attempts, it’s surprisingly lacking in tension. Even at the early stages, when the invasion occurs, there’s only a minute or two that could actually qualify as scary. Before much time at all has passed, the fear has completely evanesced, and all that is left is tedium.

This is by design. The meat of Bel Canto is what happens during this tedium. The hostages soon discover that their captors are on the side of good, and after this happens, relationships start forming. Romances bloom. The two sides eventually feel so comfortable in their strange new habitat, no one really cares if they get rescued or not. People begin to teach each other things; how to sing, how to play chess, how to speak other languages. Regardless of the way they arrived there, the fortress surrounded by men with guns becomes a haven. A home.

Obviously, it can’t last. There’s an inescapable, loudly telegraphed ending to Bel Canto, obvious from early in the film where Roxanne makes an off the cuff remark about the fate of some players in an opera. As it gradually closes in on this finale, events feel more and more manipulative. Everything is engineered to give this conclusion the maximum emotional impact; nothing happens organically. Although these thinly-drawn characters were never going to be easy to invest in, once the full force of the manipulation rears its ugly head, it is nigh on impossible to care about anyone. It’s cheap, lazy, and more than anything, boring.

In Conclusion

Despite an excellent cast, Bel Canto is a complete mess. Replete with unnatural dialogue and emotionally manipulative plot developments, it may well go down in cinematic history as the most boring hostage drama of all time. At least that’s an achievement. Of sorts.

Have you seen Bel Canto? What did you think?

Bel Canto is released in the US on September 14th. For further release information, click here.