Callas Forever

Wow. Wow, and wow. Go and see this movie. And take a hanky.

If you like opera you'll probably love it (though you never can tell with opera buffs). But I don't think you'd have to love opera to like the film, and you certainly don't need to be knowledgable about opera to 'get' what's going on. It places opera in the broader world of rock music, film, journalism and abstract art, and is really a film not principally about opera, but about relationships -friendship, love and growing older (youth hitting middle age, I mean, not old age). And if you know nothing of opera, the tracks you'll hear will make you understand what you've been missing all this time. Traviata could make a grown man cry.

It's beautifully shot, quite a bit of it in Paris. Fanny Ardant is brilliant, and, as you'd expect from Zefirelli, the subtleties of the unfolding relationships are so real you think you're in the movie yourself. And the sight of Jeremy Irons playing Zefirelli's brain inside Francis Rossi's body and hairstyle is absolutely unmissable. I took one look at posh Irons with a ponytail, and thought ''this will never work". But how wrong I was.