Last year’s 300th anniversary of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons passed with surprisingly little comment, although this well-meaning but ploddingly stately movie emerged in Italy, based on Tiziano Scarpa’s prizewinning novel Stabat Mater, and imagining a musically inspired affaire de coeur between Antonio Vivaldi and a brilliant and beautiful teenage violinist – one of the female orphans at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà who are tutored by him in music.
Opera director Damiano Michieletto makes his underpowered cinema debut here, and the whole film, with its lifeless staging, uninteresting performances and laughably naive ending can only be described as the school of Salieri. We hear fragments of music that are clearly supposed to be tantalising early drafts of the Four Seasons, evolving in Vivaldi’s head – but exasperatingly we don’t hear the inspirationally catchy masterpiece itself until the final credits.
Michele Riondino laboriously plays Vivaldi, who is always coughing into his handkerchief without delivering the piteous death expected on these occasions, and Tecla Insolia plays the fictional Cecilia, one of the many demure orphan-girl musicians in their Handmaid’s Tale outfits, playing for the simperingly bewigged great and good of Venice. Disaster looms as it looks as if Cecilia will be married off to a nobleman, which means no more music – but if she can somehow flunk the virginity test, Cecilia thinks she will be allowed to stay in the orphanage. This moment of raunchy jeopardy is prissily soft-pedalled by the film, and even the brutal violence that it causes passes off blandly, and the movie returns to its earnest and pious solemnity.
• Primavera is in UK cinemas from 24 April.
