WARNING: Saturday is your last day to see this, from Minnesota Opera! I could've written this earlier so you'd have more time. But I didn't, so you don't. So it goes.
It's an opera film about two women, Diane and Olivia, who were friends with unstable childhoods, only now, Diane has achieved a steady middle-class existence, whereas Diane has been arrested for serial killing. That was a weird way to phrase that. The libretto basically consists of letters back and forth between them, talking about their pasts and trying to figure how things got so fucked. Extremely unsurprisingly, this involved sexual violence.
(Diane has a Bikini Kill poster in her cell. Do they sell those at the prison commissary?)
You look at a serial killer and you pretty much just perceive a deeply broken person, and that's fair enough; as an avocation, serial killing really is only available to the horrendously fucked up. And yet, that person is still a person, and I feel like this piece does a good job of conveying that. It's quite good, really, with a few very memorable moments, as when Diane is trying to talk about what she did and all of a sudden she switches from the blank inmate look to the lurid hooker costume/make-up and sings a perversely jazzy little song about it. Also, the murder ballad "Banks of the Ohio" appears several times to rather spine-tingling effect.
Yeah man, pretty good stuff. I hope that it will be available in some form in the future rather than just disappearing into the ether. That's no good.
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