Part of Joseph Losey's genius as a film director was to make his settings - the buildings, the outdoors, the weather - work for him. The sun-drenched Oxford of Accident and the rain-sodden trenches of For King and Country are active players in those two masterpieces. For the film of Don Giovanni he had the waterways of Venice, a Palladian villa and the surrounding countryside at his disposal, and he seems to have looked towards them for a comparable effect. But they're irrelevant: not to his purposes, maybe, but to Mozart's. If Losey sincerely thought that he could collaborate with dead Mozart as he did with live Pinter he was much mistaken. The outcome is two parallel creations, the formal relationship being a limiting force on the one side, a distraction on the other.

In much of it one is faced with the unwelcome dilemma of deciding whether Losey is being insensitively inept or ineffectively imposing. Whatever its cause, the mismatch starts with the Overture where the visual accompaniment to Mozart's excited allegro is a tranquil expanse of calm water. If accidental, it is a fault; if deliberate, then something worse, because it would be setting up a counterpoint to the music for (at best) dubious purposes and to doubtful effect. A friend of a friend of mine used to be heard murmuring “Bogoids” at the mention of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. I don't know about that, but there are plenty of bogoids here. Look no further than “the black valet”.

The principal singers, all experienced and effective operatic artists on their own ground, act like automata. All sing well, and no doubt the orchestra, under Maazel, plays impeccably, but even with the improved sound of this new edition, they are too nearly consigned to the function of providing background music. The film is certainly memorable (I found it “came back” vividly over the 16-year gap), but that of itself does not constitute grounds for recommendation.