Making 9/10: Love Before the Fall
1. The Real, the Magical, and the Mythological
Whereas Orson Welles’ mind dreams up a bardo inside an empty theater in which his intellect can come to terms with the life he had led and the heart attack that is killing him, the four characters in 9/10 are ordinary, relatable people having dinner in an Italian restaurant called Passaggio in New York’s Little Italy. While Orson’s narrative is non-linear and Möbius strip-like, the narrative of 9/10 is more straightforward, and powered by dramatic irony, since the viewer is told at the outset that the story takes place the night before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. That said, if the audience doesn’t know that the film is part two of something called the Bardo Trilogy, then it is in the same boat as the characters, who realize only gradually that the Passaggio is in fact the bardo.
9/10 is told from the point of view of Lulu, the Passaggio’s hostess — and possibly an avatar (in this telling) for the eternal feminine — who alone perceives all three of the story’s concurrent storylines. One is the realistic account of four friends employed at the Twin Towers enjoying a meal that culminates in a double marriage proposal. The second is a gentle gloss on the mythological story of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which Orpheus tends bar, Eurydice is a disembodied voice on the radio, and Charon is the restaurant’s strolling violinist. The third is Lulu’s own magical realist realm in which the Passaggio and the bardo, filled with anime di passaggio occupy the same space.
I have combined mythological characters, “real” ones, and imaginary ones before in the grand opera Amelia (2010), in which a retelling of the Icarus and Daedalus story runs concurrently with the narrative of a young expectant mother’s pregnancy, and in which the woman’s dead father roused her from a coma by placing an impossible pilot’s “final letter” on her sleeping breast. In that story, the only character who perceived every reality was Amelia. In 9/10 the anime di passaggio perceive everything, as do the angels in Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (1987). It is the destiny of the four diners in 9/10 to be awakened by Charon to perceive the magical, mythological worlds recognized in Wenders’ film by children, transitional souls, and Peter Falk.
Mortal partners Cory and Trina, middle-aged lawyers with offices in Tower #2, and their younger friends, Tony, a chef at Windows on the World (the restaurant that occupied the 106th and 107th floors of the World Trade Center in Tower #1), and his partner Bibi, an actress who serves as a hostess there, all sing, and are audible to everyone. Magical characters Lulu, Orfeo, and Charon, are mute. The diners and wait staff, or anime di passaggio, are audible to one another, and to the four mortals, but inaudible to us. Eury is a disembodied spirit whose voice, audible to everyone, emanates from the radio, accompanied by a “Spirit Coro” of female Furies. Finally, there is Charon and his violin, through and with which he expresses himself in the simultaneously intellectually abstract and emotionally hyper-specific language of music.
The instant that the artist Charon extends his hand for payment is the moral, spiritual, ethical, and philosophical inflection point, the “fall,” if you will, in all the concurrent narratives. Once the four mortals realize who he is and what he is about they have crossed over into the magical and mythological realms and are consequently rendered mute. Eury has been explaining who Charon is since the beginning of the operafilm by singing, first as a Pet Sounds-Badalamenti-style pop song on the restaurant radio that incorporates the Spirit Coro of Furies as silky backup singers while the viewer is introduced via a montage to the anime di passaggio, Christina Rossetti’s concise allegorical poem, Ferry Me Across the Water, in which the ferryman demands a fee to ferry a soul across the River Styx to the afterlife. At the very end, when we hear the planes hit the towers and the faint calls of the first responders as the four mortals depart, they hear themselves singing with Eury on the radio.
The instrumental Cavatina (end title) serves several functions. Scored for (wordless) Eury with harp and guitar, it concludes the narrative strand of Eury and Orfeo (whose instrument was the lyre). The music also combines the music of the Ferry Me song heard throughout with the Everything theme of the final ensemble. I suppose I should have had a violin playing to round out Charon’s story, but I chose instead the softness of the flute, which I had placed throughout the score as a partner to Trina, Bibi, and the Spirit Coro. Perhaps in my heart Charon’s work was done.
2. Staging 9/10 versus Orson
Bearing in mind what Menotti told me years previous about staged opera: “A stage director looks at a scene one way; the composer looks at the scene in another way; the librettist sees it a third way. The composer must craft a scene so clear in intent that all three are compelled to agree.” The challenge with operafilm is that, as a gesamtkunstwerk, it requires the coordinating vision of someone with a grasp of the audio, visual and textual correlatives as well as how to manage actors on a film set. If the visual, musical, textual, and staging ideas are generated simultaneously by the composer, and then directed and film edited by the composer, the result is operafilm.
The movement in Orson was non-naturalistic, pairing musical and Berkoff-like physical leitmotifs such as moving hands to ears with “edit,” an outward wave of the hand with “you’re a mess, honey,” opened palms out with “go on singing,” a pointing finger with “syncopation,” hyper-extended tableaus, and so forth. This “gestus” effect was combined with the Brechtian montage effect of having multiple Orson avatars chatting with one another and singing directly to a (non-existent) audience, making them their own raisonneurs. The didactic theater effect of musical / dramatic vignettes (I called them “beats”) paired with explanatory intertitles broke the fourth wall, reminding the viewer that they were watching a play within a film. These effects were enhanced by shooting most of the “onstage” action in wide shots from the balconies, adding actual physical distance between the cameras and the action.
I took an opposite, staged realism approach to staging 9/10, in which every action was diegetic and occurred within the realistic restaurant setting, and directed to another actor, not the audience, in the Stanislavskian sense. I leaned hard into proxemics, both in the physical staging and in the use of extreme closeups, to concentrate the narrative’s emotional claustrophobia, strengthen the communal experience for the actors, and clarify the deep staging effect (near-medium-far) within a confined space. Whereas in Orson I used Welles’ elevated language, in 9/10 I underlined the dialogue’s naturalism by juxtaposing it with the poetic language of the Christina Rossetti poem, which was itself conversational in nature, drawing attention to its “otherness” by sometimes presenting it in Italian.
When she wrote the libretto of our opera Amelia (2010), I asked Gardner McFall to incorporate key aspects of her personal narrative into the story to intensify the storytelling’s psychological verisimilitude. I would not have done so unless I had had every intention of baring myself as emotionally in the crafting of the score. Knowing the four actors for whom I would craft roles in 9/10, in an aggressive example of authorial use of the Strasberg method (or an extreme example of what composers call the “Italian Method” for writing operatic roles), before I began to flesh out the scenario, I asked the actors to write essays about their characters that incorporated facets of their own real-life experiences that I in turn integrated into the libretto. I am grateful to the actors for allowing me to integrate some of the autobiographical details that they shared. This aspect of our collaboration was crucial to the story’s believability.
3. Musical Style and Technique as Character
Although the difference between musical theater acting singers and operatic singing actors is not absolute, typically, live musical theater acting singers lean into characterization and live operatic singing actors focus, because their audience requires it, on beauty of sound. A musical theater singer can be a Stanislavskian, or a Method actor, literally feeling the emotions that the character is experiencing, because their audience interprets their “getting choked up” as emotional authenticity. Amplification can enhance the effectiveness of singing actors in live performance.
To maintain proper alignment of the instrument, most opera singers (who are required to create not just a big sound to fill a theater, but a beautiful, big sound) are taught that they cannot risk allowing a Strasbergian remembrance of experience to get them physically out of alignment. Consequently, classical acting is their usual go-to, as it requires “sticking to the script,” which composers and conductors appreciate. The chamber musician in them cottons to the sort of finding of truth through ensemble building of the Meisner method. Authenticity through collective imagination allows the muscles to remain aligned, and the voice to emerge, physically “unaffected” by the emotion conveyed. Amplification does not enhance the effectiveness of acting singers in live performance.
In 9/10, both types of singing and acting were presented simultaneously. Further, working with the interactions between differing musical and technical methods served as a key characterization tool. On the one hand, the actors sang live to an audience they could literally touch, interacting with them and with stationary and moving cameras just as close in. While the thrill of hearing a big voice fill a big space was lost, it was replaced by the white-hot intimacy of the physicality of being sung to (and filmed) up close, intensified by the psychological toll the singers paid, and the bravery required to be emotionally naked inches away from complete strangers.
Tony’s role was written to be executed by an alternative rock-singing actor; Bibi’s role was written for an operetta-scaled light soubrette; Cory was written for a big-voiced, American crossover opera/musical theater voice; and Trina was written for a contemporary vocal music specialist.
Trina, Eury, and the Furies were all sung by Gilda Lyons, who, with her remarkable, precise voice and broadly flexible technique tackled several very different vocal styles and colors during the piece. To voice Eury, she sang on mic in classic studio recording fashion; for the Spirit Coro she sang extremely “hot-miced” and “breathily” off the instrument; and as Trina, she sang as a fully supported live opera performer before a live audience. Each type of singing sounded radically different and required a different physical method. The underlying timbral pallet of her voice remained consistent to the extent that, at a certain point, one began hearing Eury in Trina, Trina in the Coro, and the Coro in Eury. Her polymathic approach embodied the aesthetic goal of the piece, combining in a single voice what combining all four characters’ differing voices did in ensembles.
The same enthusiastic polystylism runs as a theme throughout my four decades-plus career as a composer of vocal music. From the male soprano 70s folk-rock singing lap dancer Vera in Vera of Las Vegas to the Peter Pears-style role of Frank Lloyd Wright in Shining Brow; from the torch songstress in A Woman in Morocco to the modernist freaking out Maid in Brow; from the avantgarde vocalisms of Madness and Sorrow to the shape note singing in Art of Song; from the amped up verismo in Bandanna to European cool jazz Swingle Singers-style parallel 11th chords in The Waking Father for the Kings Singers; and so on.
4. Audiovisual Counterpoint, or “Vertical Kuleshov”
One spends a lifetime studying musical polyphony. What musicians refer to as “counterpoint” is the study of how two or more “horizontal” melodies performed simultaneously interact and, by doing so, the various ways in which their interaction generates “vertical” harmony. For our purposes, let’s equate a melody with a visual image. Overlaying a second image will create visual counterpoint between the two images the way that a second melody creates aural counterpoint between the two melodies.
One way to stipulate which line in music is more important than another is to assign it a louder “dynamic.” Musicians still use the original Italian forte for loud and piano for soft, with gradations in between. In Orson I controlled the “volume” of the superimposed images by assigning them varying percentages of opacity (see below).
OVERLAY: #1: PALE RED DEPARTING BOY’S BACK AS HE WALKS IN FRAME L (10%); #2: B+W WIDE SHOT OF THREE ORSONS AS CHORISTERS FROM AUDIENCE L, FRAME M (80%); #3; B+W WIDE SHOT OF O1 FROM BALCONY L, FRAME R (10%)
If I were to take care to draw a correlation between dynamics in music and opacity in film in translating the “shot description” above into words, it would read like this: This sequence is comprised of three simultaneously shown strips of film (melodies). Melody/Film #1 consists of an image of the Departing Boy’s back as he walks away from the camera with a pale red color filter over the original black and white image. That image is seen on the left side of the frame and its opacity is 10%, which would make him piano. Melody/Film #2 consists of a black and white wide shot of all three Orson avatars standing together holding their music as choristers do, seen from the point of view of an audience member sitting on the left side of the theater. The image is seen in the middle of the screen and its opacity is 80%, which would make it forte. Melody/Film #3 consists of a black and white image of Orson #1 as seen in a wide shot from the left balcony, positioned on the right side of the frame and its opacity is 10%, which would make it, like #1, piano.
This triage succeeds in establishing visually the foreground-middle ground-background effect that Rimsky-Korsakov described in orchestration. Composers are taught not to micromanage the dynamics in individual orchestral players’ parts but rather to think in terms of instrumental choirs that have practiced balancing with one another since childhood. What makes the music that results from combining the different choirs (brass, winds, strings,) remain coherent? The underlying score, if the composer is composing idiomatically for the instrument that is the orchestra, not the dynamics.
Just so, there must be an underlying logic to the imagery. One method that I pursue was to equate what musicians call “species” counterpoint (a codification of the way in which a melody comes into dissonance and consonance with the other lines sounding simultaneously) with placement on the screen. An image covering the entire frame would serve to the frame the same function that the “cantus firmus” serves in musical counterpoint. I correlated overlaid images that filled only a portion of the screen with fragments of melody, or a line in a specific “species.”
The resulting “composite” image could be made to function as a single measure of music containing multiple voices does, or as a sequence of measures, like a counterpoint solution. The technical goal is to create overlaid composite images that maintained the underlying logic of the scene so that they interacted like sections of the orchestra working together to project a composite musical sound. As a composer, I know that the orchestra as an instrument was built to obscure mistakes and to magnify good orchestration decisions. It does this by tricking the listener’s mind and ear, which are working to make sense of the composite sound it is hearing just as a filmgoer’s mind and eye are working to sort out what the combined images mean.
Operafilm commences when the music on the soundtrack is executing the same triage that the images are in strict coordination. When words are added to the images and the music, then the triangulation that I am after is possible.
In tonal western music, dissonance resolves to consonance; the process is generated as the product of the union of vertical and horizontal forces at work in the apprehension of polyphony. I chose in 9/10 to assert that dissonant images were those that were extremely complex, out of focus, and highly abstract—in other words, I leaned into the notion that dissonance is a transitional state that seeks rest in consonance. I correlated stable shots with stable tonality; when I made visual montage I destabilized the key center in the music. Collage covers what was behind it; overlays allow what is beneath to interact with what obscures it contrapuntally. Orson explored this counterpoint and leaned into relative opacity to differentiate layers.
I wanted in 9/10 not to rely on dynamics but rather to focus on creating audiovisual florid counterpoint during the dining / ensemble sections, trusting the audience (which takes the role of the individual orchestral player) to assign value (dynamics) and visual hierarchy to the layers through their counterpoint (again, collage). The 360-degree shots around the ensemble sections served as the cantus firmus; the cut-in stable shots were the camera highlighting/limning visual “lines” also being carried textually (“may I have a doppio?”) and musically. I did this to intensify the music’s role in the visual-words-music interplay.
Then why did I use split screen in 9/10? Because split screen reintroduces the “horizontal Kuleshov” effect by forcefully and discretely showing the dissonance between two simultaneous images / sounds—the audiovisual equivalent of chiaroscuro: overlaying the same image results in a gentler limning effect. The climactic ensemble during which the screen is split into four parts was the highpoint of the “horizontal audiovisual counterpoint” in 9/10. It was followed by the high point of “vertical audiovisual counterpoint” in the long, crossfaded and multiply overlaid lyrical audiovisual language of the “everything” sextet that followed.
5. A 9/10 Walkthrough: “I am / I want / I was”
9/10 was filmed with four stationary cameras set at the four points of the compass, and one handheld Steadicam that shot closeups and cowboy shots. The more emotionally elevated the moment, the closer in the camera. I fully storyboarded it based on foreknowledge of the camera placement. In other words, it wasn’t shot to the storyboards but rather edited to them from the coverage gathered from the four stationary cameras, along with the setups (for the 360-degree shots and the cutaways in the bar).
One narrative structure was the musical form of rondo, in which my setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem (in English and Italian) served as the refrain (or “A” theme) and the four “I am / I want” character-driven arias served as “B” themes, framed by a Charon-centric, pantomimed introduction and coda over a string chorale.
Prologue: Charon | A | B (Tony) | A | B (Bibi) | A | B (Cory) | A | B (Trina) | A | Coda: Charon
Another narrative structure mirrored the progression of courses in an Italian meal. Following is a walkthrough of the film in which I touch on some of the things that I think are important takeaways.
Prologue
Over the image of an upwards escalator that crossfades into the façade of the World Trade Center, Dante’s quotation, “Remember tonight, for it is the start of everything” is presented as an epigram to 9/10. We see the shadows of four souls, and follow Charon into the Passaggio, where he arrives for work, greeting Orfeo and Lulu, and unpacking his violin. Underpinned by a string chorale that moved back and forth between pre-recorded acoustic string orchestra (I conducted the Rize Orchestra in Chicago performing the soundtrack in a session prior to shooting) and midi strings (a sonic metaphor for the bardo, half digital and half analogue), Eury is heard, in duet with a solo cello, wordlessly singing the Ferry Me tune and the three-note F#-E-C# motto from Orson (derived from the chorus of sailors in Billy Budd), associated in 9/10 with Eury and her Spirit Coro.
Aperitivo
Charon sips a glass of wine. Cowboy shots and muddy, poetic two ups introduce Mors and the various angels and mythological characters dining in the Passaggio as Eury, on the radio, tells us what the operafilm is going to be about by singing the entirety of the Christina Rossetti poem. Mortals Tony and Bibi arrive and the tricky transition to humans singing takes place when Bibi sings “The sky today was Navy Blue,” a nod to the first line of the opera Amelia. Charon joins them, knitting them into the magical space musically. The cutting here is fast and sitcom-style, befitting the two young lovers and their humble attempts at repartee. When Trina arrives, singing “Olé” in a nod to the final scene of Bernstein’s opera A Quiet Place (1983), the Spirit Coro (with whom she is paired throughout) immediately underpins her ebullience with unsettling keening. A triple lyric about politician Rudy Guiliani, who was mayor at the time, rides above the keyboard-centric “Dining Quartet” music that returns each time the four sing together.
Antipasto
Lulu enters bearing antipasto, and Charon plays the Ferryman tune accompanied by the Spirit Coro and joined, in Italian, by Trina and Bibi, who are turn is joined by Eury on the radio. It is the first gentle parting of the veil separating the living and the dead. Tony, left out, tells Orfeo that he and Cory are going to “ask the girls to tie the knot. A double proposal, a double knot, a bow” during dinner. His aria, underpinned by a fretless bass, acoustic guitar, and shaker, is vocally raw and discomfiting; he’s joined by the Spirit Coro in a signal that he’s long been living, as a recovering heroin addict, with one foot in the afterlife: they have his number. As with the other three arias, his is closely shot with un-stabilized handheld camera in closeup. His life story, as he relates it, includes light lifts from public interviews with Anthony Bourdain. At the center of his aria is an “I was” cutaway to the bar where he reveals his truth to Orfeo. He concludes by telling Bibi, “And here we are, learning to listen.”
Il Primo
Charon plays the Ferryman tune again as Lulu sets a big bowl of pasta on the table. Trina asks Bibi what Eury, on the radio, is singing about, and she explains, “something about a ferryboat … she’s paying him for passage.” Over frozen chords, Bibi moves to the bar and coyly asks Orfeo who sings the song Addicted to Love better, Tina Turner or Robert Palmer. Orfeo and Charon exchange glances, and she follows her train of thought forward into her aria, singing, “I’m not addicted to love, but I’m in love with an addict.” The Spirit Coro begins to keen again as she relates her story over a four note descending bass line recalling Dido’s Lament. She’s followed closely by the handheld camera in closeup as she (as Tony had before her) traces a circuit around the dining room – the ensemble numbers are all static. When she reaches the release point in her aria her music (the Shibuya-kei described earlier) is painful and touching in its ingenuous “After School Special” insights. She sings about being a singer, and how she’s learned how to either approach the passaggio from above or below, not knowing exactly what she is saying. Tony joins her, and then it is time for her “I was” cutawaywith Orfeo. She finishes her aria by admitting that she doesn’t know what will happen next: “We’ll figure it out,” she sings, “Listening to learn.” Charon resumes playing the Ferryman song as Eury sings the Rossetti lyric in Italian and Trina calls Cory on her flip phone, admonishing him to hurry up. He arrives as she sings, “or better yet, arrive.”
Il Secondo
Cory barrels in to “dining quartet” music, drunk, Charon magically, and with great familiarity, at his heel. Cory knows the Passaggio denizens well; he hugs Lulu, calls out to Orfeo, and tries to remember the words of the Ferryman tune, “the one with the words by Christina Rossetti. I can’t get it out of my head.” There’s a Hollywood whoosh in the orchestra into the impossibly bright key of C# major as he and Charon sing a new, very Broadway take on the Ferryman song, circling the dining room as Bibi and Tony had during their arias. Eury even joins them on the radio. He pushes Charon away and bows to Trina, his entrance, as he at least sees it, charmingly managed. Their intimate dialogue, over pizzicato strings, is intelligent and rueful. He swings into the second part of his aria, which is reminiscent of the “bro music” that Taco and Dumdum sang to one another in Vera of Las Vegas. He’s charming, louche, and lost, as he reveals once he reaches his “I was” cutaway moment with Orfeo in the bar. All of this shot handheld very close up and Cassavetes-style. One can’t help but like the guy. The Spirit Coro encourages (mourns?) him as he sings about his hopes of pulling himself together for Trina. A brief duet for him and best friend Tony repeating the music associated with their justification as addicts for toying with death as they do before he wheels back into the closing portion of his aria, vowing that he wants to “make the right call: love before the fall.”
Il Contorno
“I admit I’m a bit stoned,” sings Cory as he hugs Tony hello and joins the “Dining Quartet #1,” which commences as Lulu emerges from the kitchen with a huge plate of vegetables. A luxurious 360-degree shot encircles the table in a visual embrace as they pepper one another with the affectionate, bourgeois, Buñuel-esque patter of communal eating, cut-in shots break the flow, limning moments in the musical counterpoint by marking them with brief stationary closeups. Cory accidentally tips his wine glass over, spilling his drink in Trina’s lap, the glass shattering on the floor. The visual editing becomes jagged and disjunct to match the disgusted exchange between the two. She moves to the bar, commands Orfeo to fetch her seltzer and a cloth to address the stain. The acoustic strings give way to icy synthesized strings as Mors, Charon, and the other immortals dispassionately observe her distress, accompanied only by the furiously keening Spirit Coro beneath. Her aria begins with a pizzicato ostinato in the bass recalling the passacaglia in the fourth Britten Sea Interlude.The Spirit Coro is fully engaged, an extension of her inner turmoil, as she sings an aria filled with compassion, rage, sorrow, and hope. When the Spirits do console her and she has her “I was” cutaway moment with Orfeo in the bar, she claims her love for Cory, who as she emerges from her most intimate (and distant) place, joins her in the place they understand one another the best—their mutual understanding as lawyers of the fact that “the truth must be weighed against the human heart.” Cory apologizes, begs her to return to the table. As she does, a sextet for the four of them, plus Eury and Charon, unfolds in which the men promise to “do the work to remain sober” — a promise they’re both unlikely to be able to keep. The action freezes in. time as Cory observes that they all are, at least for an augenblick, “alive in a moment.” The tableaux is shot in a slow 360-degree embrace, with overlays as each character expresses their most ardently-felt emotion.
Il Dolce
Lulu brings dessert, reactivating the narrative. The “Dining Quartet #2,” which again celebrates the couples’ love for one another, is shot in a 360-shot as before but with more cut-ins and an undercurrent of anxiety. Bibi reveals that she has experienced a breakthrough as a singer, singing a note that “spun like a crystal in the air, too beautiful for this world.” Trina responds by sharing that she’s realized that “the Truth has many names, but it is one.” In handheld Cowboy shots, Tony shares how beautiful the view was that morning from the top of the World Trade Center and Cory relates how beautiful it was to look out the window of his office and see the ferryboats crossing back and forth like water-striders. This dramatic inflection point is marked by a division into four screens, which, over another iteration of the Ferrymankeyboard-led music, limn individual lines in the voices as they repeat the texts just described, comments with callbacks to previous shots, and call forwards to upcoming shots. They are all “out of time” singing about being out of time (the audience and they are both beginning to intuit that something is going to happen) as characters only can in opera. The sextet settles into a final “we were” cutaway duet at the bar for Tony and Cory, who’ve retreated to gather their courage to propose to their partners. During the duet, they agree that they view themselves as, “contented shrimp reapers in isolated tide pools” before venturing back to the dining room to propose to their partners as…
Caffè
…is served. They propose and their partners, to the music of the sailors in Billy Budd and to Orson, sing “Yes I will.” The highly lyrical montage that follows combines long crossfades, Steadicam and stable shots dovetailing as the four sing “I love you” to the same musical motive while singing, “remember tonight, for it is the start of everything” — the Dante epigram from the beginning. The moment is prolonged until the point at which Eury and Charon join them as though in blessing, certainly with compassion. Multiple overlays of Trina singing “everything” double down on the increasingly elegiacal mood until Charon ends things by extending his hand for payment.
Digestivo
The opening string music returns in its entirety beneath the extended pantomime in which the characters come to terms with death. Stipulating that throughout the operafilm framing adhered to the rule of thirds as much as possible, during this final stretch I leaned especially into emulating 18th century religious paintings when both staging and framing the shots. The editing was stately and studiedly traditional, with over the shoulder handheld reaction shots and (rarely used in this project) pans focusing attention on the characters’ faces. The forceful use of the first sound effect in the operafilm occurs with the chair crashing to the floor and the simultaneous crack of thunder heralding the beginning of the rain (which I intentionally foreshadowed at the start of the heart attack in Orson) that falls once they have accepted their fates. It is followed by the emotional sweep of strings and melody first heard at the beginning when Lulu hugged Charon as Cory hugs Trina and, together, moving in the only use of slow-motion in the screenplay they and the others leave the Passaggio, their voices continuing to sing on the soundtrack with Eury. Charon puts away his violin, submits to the affectionate ministrations of Lulu as she places his stocking cap over his head, and exits. The final sounds are of rain, of the planes hitting the Towers the next morning, the calls of the first responders, and the faint pre-recorded “we’re sorry” of an unconnected call.
Watch the operafilm on Amazon Plus Video here.