A less operatic filmmaker than Benoît Jacquot could hardly be imagined: A Single Girl (1995) was Dogme 95 before there really was a Dogme 95, and The School of Flesh (1998) remains enigmatic and tight-lipped in emotion and meaning despite its perversity. Hardly the type for an adaptation of that most operatic of operas, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.

Jacquot’s approach, however, is to push the artifice to the point of self-reflexive austerity, a detachment that somehow makes the emotion, not to mention the music, all the more plangent. Reminiscent of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal, this Tosca take place on a darkened soundstage with simple, vividly colored sets, representing a cathedral and a prison in war-torn 1800 Rome, that float like magic lanterns in a black void. And the opera is a bit self-reflexive itself, since Floria Tosca (a monumental Angela Gheorghiu) is herself a singer, a fiery diva whose jealousy makes life difficult for her artist/Bonapartist beau, Mario Cavaradossi (a wan Roberto Alagna, Gheorghiu’s husband), even before it makes his death inevitable. Her passion proves a match for the calculation of lascivious police chief Scarpia (a chilling Ruggero Raimondi), and also for the æsthetics of Jacquot, whose attempt at deconstructing this kitschy classic (black-and-white footage of the cast in the recording studio emphasizing the point already made by the stark staging) only adds to its enchantment. In Italian with English subtitles. (117 minutes)