Lucia

Part of the fun of Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor (from the novel by Sir Walter Scott) is watching grandiose Italian emotions unfold in a Scottish setting. A promising idea then to shoot his version in a fetching ancestral pile just outside Edinburgh, yet this is not quite a straight opera movie, since writer/director Boyd has picked on the chestnut of life imitating art to mould music with drama. Amanda Boyd plays Kate, a budding singer, whose brother Hamish (Holland) wants to marry her off to an alcoholic American to save the family's crumbling home. But she loves hunky tenor Sam (Coxon). The production of Lucia they stage to celebrate the nuptials goes horribly wrong when fictional identities take over. Recording the arias on location has been unkind to the voices, while the lame scripting of the dramatic interpolations gets performances to match. The interjections from Kiran Akal's banal hybrid electronic score add precisely nothing.