YOU KNOW THE OLD JOKE — why does everyone hate X (say, Geoff Boycott or Hillary Clinton) on sight? Answer: “It saves time.” Over the years film has happily performed this service for opera, such masterpieces as Pretty Woman and exposing its fancypants sham as the apotheosis of naff, so camp and tragic that only foreigners and perverts can even pretend to like it — usefully helping everyone to the correct attitude without any need to actually try the thing out. Brilliantly for us pervs, of course, this keeps the riff-raff away.
