La Traviata (1983)

OPERA does not transfer easily to the screen. When it is done more or less straight, as a stage production recorded on film, it tends to look like a gigantic, somewhat clumsy marionette show, no matter how fine the voices. Not much more successful have been attempts to make opera cinematic by placing it in recognizable landscapes, played by nonsinging actors from whose bodies enormous voices magically flow without apparent physical effort.

The two forms do not exactly war with each other. Rather, they have different interests that are less often reconciled by the film maker than they are subjugated, the interests of one at the expense of the other.

All of which is recalled by way of emphasizing the triumph of Franco Zeffirelli, who wrote, designed and directed the dazzling new screen version of ''La Traviata,'' by Giuseppe Verdi, which opens today at the Paris.

I'm not sure that Mr. Zeffirelli has discovered any new principles by which all operas can be made more readily accessible to the screen. However, his ''Traviata'' is a very real personal triumph, the result of his obvious love and knowledge of opera, which he has directed both here and abroad, and of his experience as a film maker. It's not by chance that all of his earlier films, including the disastrously monosyllabic ''Endless Love,'' have seemed more operatic than cinematic.

Fifteen years ago Mr. Zeffirelli made his hugely popular ''Romeo and Juliet,'' which looked a lot better than it sounded, something that most audiences couldn't have cared less about. It was, after all, a movie.

This ''Traviata'' is something else entirely, a film adaptation of a classic work that never has the manner of something scaled down or souped up for a mass audience, though I suspect it will be immensely popular anyway. Verdi's genius will out, especially when presented with the talent, intelligence and style that have gone into this production.

Starring in the title role is Teresa Stratas, the Canadian-born Metropolitan Opera soprano who has come a long, long way since she made her motion picture debut in 1961, playing an Indian squaw in something called ''The Canadians.'' As Violetta, Miss Stratas not only sings magnificently but she also looks the role. With her large, dark doe-eyes, her elegant cheekbones and her small, slight figure that seems to have the strength of someone possessed, which Violetta is, Miss Stratas is a screen presense as riveting to watch as to listen to.

It's an acting performance of breathtaking intensity. It's so good that it eclipses, for the moment anyway, the memory of Greta Garbo in ''Camille,'' George Cukor's 1937 adaptation of the Dumas play that was also the basis of Piave's libretto for Verdi.

The camera is not as kind to Placido Domingo, who looks a little mature to be playing Alfredo, the passionate young man to whom the pleasure-bent, fatally consumptive courtesan, Violetta, gives her heart. Yet the enchantment of the movie is such that initial disbelief almost immediately gives way to the beauty of the Domingo voice and the easy self-assurance of his performance, which is far more than just respectable.

How much better to have Mr. Domingo, the man as well as his voice, than some other tenor, one who's five-by-five, or a vapid young actor lip-synching the voice of someone else.

The opera's only other major role, that of Germont, Alfredo's father, who precipitates the drama by persuading Violetta to renounce his son, is played and sung with effortless style by Cornell MacNeil. The film's conductor and musical director was James Levine, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus. Featured in the spectacular second act ball scene are Ekaterina Maksimova and Vladimir Vassiljev of the Bolshoi State Academic Theater.

Having cast the film very close to perfection, Mr. Zeffirelli has staged it in a way that serves both the film and the grandeur of the score.

There are small but important adjustments, none more effective than the film's opening, which becomes the frame for what comes later. After the credits (silent), set against pastel-colored shots of mid-19th century Paris, we hear the melancholy prelude as the camera enters Violetta's house with the manner of a discreet bailiff. Sheets cover the furniture in rooms lit only by light filtered through curtained windows.

Though Violetta lies dying in her bedroom at the far end of the apartment, the place is teeming with people - creditors, appraisers, movers - all busily dismantling the home of someone not yet dead. Violetta, still alive but already a ghost, rises and wanders through the rooms, unnoticed by all except one young workman who stares at her with the unembarrassed wonder of someone recognizing a notorious legend. In her delirium Violetta sees the happy days.

The opera's first two acts are thus gracefully turned into a single, continous flashback in which we witness her meeting with Alfredo, their few months of idyllic love in the country and then her renunciation of Alfredo to spare his family disgrace.

Some of Mr. Zeffirelli's montages, in which he opens up the opera, become a bit treacly, particularly when he's showing us how Violetta and Alfredo wiled away the hours in their country retreat. Others, however, are surprisingly effective, including the ones in which we see Alfredo's sister, for whose happiness Violetta has been urged to give up Alfredo. The actress, unidentified, who plays the sister, looks to have come out of a Rossetti painting and helps fix the film in its time.

''La Traviata'' benefits from Mr. Zeffirelli's talents as a designer as much as from his gifts as a director. The physical production is lush without being fussy. Nor is it ever overwhelming. This possibly is because at key moments we are always aware of details that, however realistic, remind us that what we are witnessing is not life but a grand theatrical experience.

It's not to be missed.

Review by VINCENT CANBY (APRIL 22, 1983), New York Times