The No Smoking Orchestra - Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies Punk Opera (2007)

PARIS, June 27 — It is no longer thought daring for moviemakers to direct opera. Roman Polanski and William Friedkin first did so some years ago. Anthony Minghella and Michael Haneke tried their hand more recently, and Woody Allen and David Cronenberg will soon have a go. Invariably the idea of opera house managers is to add some screen buzz (and, they hope, draw new audiences) to their standard repertory…

On the other hand Gérard Mortier, the director of the Paris National Opera, was taking a risk when he invited the Serb film director Emir Kusturica to create a new work here. Put simply, Mr. Mortier, who will take over as general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera in 2009, was also asking a traditionally conservative audience to embrace a so-called Gypsy punk opera, with amplified orchestra and voices, pop-up décor, a flock of geese and a heavy dose of Balkan magical realism.

With “Le Temps des Gitans,” or “Time of the Gypsies,” an adaptation of Mr. Kusturica’s 1988 award-winning movie of the same name, it is this idiosyncratic world that has been brought to the stage of the Bastille Opera.

Closer to riotous spectacle than lyric opera, the 100-minute one-act show is held together as much by imaginative staging as by a score alternating between folksy Gypsy music and hard rock. The voices blasting out of banks of loudspeakers in turn seem closer to those of musical comedy than in Mozart or Verdi.

“The opera is going to be how Monty Python could have imagined opera,” Mr. Kusturica (pronounced koos-toor-EET-sa), 52, told reporters during rehearsals. “Sometimes it is a parody of opera, sometimes it is a self-parody.”

It is also, in a sense, what Mr. Kusturica’s cultish followers might have expected of the Sarajevo-born director of “When Father Was Away on Business” and “Underground,” which each won the top prize at Cannes in 1985 and 1995, respectively, as well as of “Black Cat, White Cat,” “Arizona Dream” and “Time of the Gypsies,” perhaps his most popular film, for which he won the Palme d’Or in 1989 for best director.

Well, the gamble appears to have paid off, at least judging by the ovation given at Tuesday’s opening night to Mr. Kusturica’s stage adaptation of “Time of the Gypsies.” And if the audience looked younger than customary at the Bastille Opera, this too is part of Mr. Mortier’s wager: He has scheduled 15 performances, 50 percent more than the norm, and is charging half the usual price for seats.

The libretto, written by Nenad Jankovic, simplifies the plot of the movie to the ill-fated love story between two teenage Gypsies, Perhan (Stevan Andjelkovic) and Azra (Milica Todorovic), along with Perhan’s involvement with Ahmed (Mr. Jankovic), a sleazy villager who has grown rich in Milan by kidnapping Gypsy children and turning them into beggars.

Perhan invites trouble by following Ahmed to Milan, lured by the promises of quick wealth. When he returns to his village, he finds that Azra has become pregnant by his uncle, whom he duly kills. Perhan marries Azra but gives away her baby, only to discover a few years later that the boy is begging in Milan. Finally, when Perhan finds that his sister has become one of Ahmed’s streetwalkers, a shootout leaves the stage covered in corpses.

Written without dialogue or recitatives (and sung in the Roma language with French subtitles), the opera is told through a series of set-piece scenes, each shaped by Mr. Kusturica’s extraordinary visual imagination. And while this is the first time he has directed onstage, his movie experience of working with crowds, most memorably in noisy village wedding parties, has evidently served him well.

The opera’s music is also no stranger to him. For the past 20 years, between making movies, Mr. Kusturica has played guitar in a punk and techno rock group called the No Smoking Orchestra. For this occasion the 10-man band shares the pit of the Bastille Opera with the Garbage Serbian Philharmonia which, despite its bizarre name, uses classical music instruments.

Composed by Dejan Sparavalo, Mr. Jankovic and Mr. Kusturica’s son, Stribor, the score is driven along by oompah rhythms typical of Gypsy songs and dances, occasionally interrupted by electric guitar solos and rock music, much of it catchy enough for some audience members to clap to the beat (surely a first at the Paris Opera).

What makes this show roll along is the circuslike mood of the crowded stage, with dwarfs, jugglers, acrobats and musicians variously accompanied by a tractor, caravans, village huts that lift off the ground, three stuffed turkeys and the ever-present (and remarkably well-behaved) flock of geese.(Ivana Protic designed the sets and Nebojsa Lipanovic the costumes.)

Mr. Kusturica occasionally projects movie excerpts, some from “Time of the Gypsies,” but also one showing Robert de Niro playing with a gun in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and even a sequence of the former Argentine soccer star Diego Armando Maradona scoring a famous goal, taken from Kusturica’s own documentary, “Maradona.”

For the scenes set in Milan, the impressive backdrop is the facade of the Duomo, the city’s cathedral, from which emerge dancing nuns and priests. It is there that the final scene takes place: a dozen characters (some killed only minutes earlier), attached to wires, are lifted to hang beside the saintly statuary decorating the cathedral.

When the curtain came down, the Bastille Opera’s audience was quick on its feet, cheering Mr. Kusturica and his team. And while it seemed like a good number of Mr. Kusturica’s loyal fans were in the crowd, Mr. Mortier, for one, must have felt relief. Since taking over the Paris Opera in 2004, his penchant for shocking the bourgeoisie has brought boos as often as applause.

If “Time for the Gypsies” proves to be a critical as well as box-office hit, though, it is just the kind of show he might take to the City Opera. Mr. Mortier likes to stir things up, and Mr. Kusturica knows how to do so, onstage as well as off.