Later, when a proposed meeting with Handel is called off, Carlo mysteriously loses his voice. In fact, there’s symbolic inadequacy as far as the eye can see. Since that very day, Handel confesses later, his imagination has been castrated. On their first meeting, for instance, Handel wanted to separate the brothers Carlo refused, Handel insulted him, Carlo spat in his face. Someone has been telling him porky pies, perhaps the same person who has, since that very day, been trying to compose an opera called Orpheus (a God associated with mutilation as well as music), to make reparation to his poor sacrificed brother.There’s quite a lot of “since that very day” in Farinelli. The dream of riding a horse and never falling off is his subconscious’s way of telling him, in the infinitely resourceful language of dreams, that he never fell off a horse. And the significance of that, not that the screenwriters bother to tell us, is that Carlo has been told that it was as a result of a riding accident that the family jewels vanished from his sporran.

Yet these two halves of a musical whole, mutually attracted and repulsed, never worked together.The significance of the horse’s head is that Carlo is haunted by nightmares of endlessly riding a white horse. The man with the horse’s head handle is in fact Handel (Jeroen Krabbe), who needs Farinelli’s voice to sing his music just as much as Farinelli needs better music to perform than the empty bravura vocal writing his brother turns out. Never mind that, in fact, he was the protege of the brothers Farina in Naples. This is history, but not as we know it.
The important thing for the screenwriters (Corbiau and his wife Andree) is that Carlo should assume his professional name at the same time as he first encounters the man in the carriage, who will become his most bitter musical adversary. Someone else asks the young man his name, and on the spur of the moment he answers Farinelli. Meanwhile, someone is listening from inside a carriage, someone who holds a stick with a handle in the shape of a horse’s head. A man in the crowd says Carlo has “farinato” the trumpeter, ground him to powder, as grain is milled to flour (farina).

The screenplay is forever setting up wild coincidences and symbolic incidents, but falls down badly when it comes to telling a comprehensible story. For instance: young Carlo Broschi, strolling through Naples with his brother Riccardo, shows off his eerie vocal skills in a musical duel with a trumpeter. On the other hand, why bother? Farinelli is a farrago, lavish without being stylish, emotionally overblown but curiously lacking in impact. If you can cope with the sight of an unconscious boy lying in a barrel of milk, with a faint welling of blood beneath the surface, you won’t embarrass your friend by fainting You can cope with Farinelli. The answers in the case of Gerard Corbiau’s Farinelli are that yes, the event is replayed in flashback, but without explicitness No sharp instruments are on show. So I want to be sure I get it right.”n ‘Mute Witness’ is screened at the LFF on 11 & 14 Nov, and opens in the UK in Jan. It’s courtesy, when reviewing a film about a castrato, to indicate for the benefit of male readers whether the defining event in a castrato’s life is passed over quickly or dwelt on, whether it’s dealt with in chronological order or held in reserve as an atrocity flashback, waiting to traumatise you.

And at the end, we got a deal we would never have got had people bought in on just a film pitch. Columbia Tri-Star, who bought the world rights to the film, had turned it down once as a script.”His next project is An American Werewolf in Paris, a tardy sequel to John Landis’s 1981 hit Other offers to direct are coming in. “They are very attractive, but I have yet to read a script which bowls me over. Although I’ve been busy and successful since leaving film school, if I measured my success on feature films alone then it has taken rather too long. “There was an incredible amount of stress but I grew close to the team. Yeltsin had ordered the storming of the Russian parliament.Filming finally began, under strict curfew, a week later Then, enter the Russian mafia.