Madame Butterfly

Puccini's classic tragic romance about a cradle-robbing scumbag (oops! excuse me, dashing romantic lead) named Pinkerton (Richard Troxell)--an officer, but not a gentleman--who weds the 15-year-old Japanese geisha girl Butterfly (Ying Huang), and then boogies home to America to find a real American wife, is brought to the big French screen by Frédéric Mitterand in realistic fashion...for an opera. And therein lies part of the problem. Remove the symbolic trappings of opera (the sparse stage elements) and put it in the real world, and the whole thing begins to look a bit silly. Still, at $19.95, you'd be crazy to pass up the chance to bore your upper crust clientele. A very strong optional purchase. (R. Pitman)