Immortal Beloved.

Cultural history is rather less well served in Immortal Beloved, Bernard Rose's film about Beethoven and the mystery woman he loved and left the emoluments from his music to. Scholars have wrangled to this day about her identity, but I doubt the wisdom of hanging an entire film about Beethoven on a search for this woman--a sort of whodunit in which the composer's life and work play second fiddle to the sleuthing for the inamorata by a devoted amanuensis, Anton Schindler.

The film gets everything wrong, starting with the casting of Ludwig. Gary Oldman is a perfectly capable actor, but one whose strong suit is his inconspicuousness, his ability to look utterly average. (When I saw him at a party, I failed to recognize him.) This is fine for certain roles, but hardly the ticket for protraying a titan whose head more readily conveys the idea of "tormented genius" than any other I can think of. This miscasting is made even crueler by having the faithful Schindler played by the Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbe, who actually does look rather like Beethoven. And Krabbe sounds Dutch or German, whereas Oldman remains basically British.

The three women on Schindler's list are similarly miscast. Countess Guicciardi is, to be sure, played by an Italian, Valeria Golino, but a Hollywoodized one with no period sense. As the Hungarian Countess Erdody, we get another Italian, Isabella Rossellini, whom the writer-director surrounds with real Hungarians speaking Hungarian, making her sound even more wrong notes. Her acting, as usual, is unduly moist, but she comes off slightly better than the third candidate, Beethoven's sister-in-law, played by the Dutch actress Johanna Ter Steege, who looks like a man in drag.

The filmmaker matches the composer's deafness with his own purblindness and tone-deafness. Bernard Rose --a rich British dilettante who has made such insufferable films as Paperhouse--is quoted as saying things such as "It's not like you hear nothing," "inside of him," "the dichotomy between the man and the music," and "they couldn't resolve [for "reconcile"] the beauty ... of the music with this deaf, impossible little man," so that "you feel alienated [sic] from the character." Believe me, please, that the speaker Rose and the writer Rose are equally subliterate: a Rose is a Rose is a Rose, no matter what the context.

The music on the soundtrack is in the hands of such luminaries as Sir Georg Solti and the London Symphony Orchestra, and the splendid Murray Perahia, Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma, and Bryn Terfel. But snippets chosen for their obviousness may not be the best approach to the music, especially when heard, as they were by me, on the shockingly malfunctioning sound system at--of all places!--the Sony screening room.

There is, however, one redeeming feature. The film's backgrounds are provided by some of the most gorgeous baroque settings of the former Czechoslovakia, and they are condignly photographed by the able Peter Suschitsky. Still, for a travelogue, you would have needed the actual locations.