It is exceptional that an opera aria becomes the emotional and dramatic axis of a commercial film. Jonathan Demme achieved it in Philadelphia (1993), in the sequence in which Tom Hanks, a lawyer suffering from terminal AIDS, seemed to inhabit—in the famous enveloping movement of the camera—Maria Callas’s legendary recording of The dead motherof Andrea Chénier. Demme relied on the center of gravity of Umberto Giordano’s opera to deactivate, in the face of a still homophobic society, the stigma of the disease and restore dignity to its victims.
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