Meeting Venus.

Meeting Venus is a beautifully detailed film but only its details work. This movie is like a lecturer who can't defend his thesis coherently but who so entertains his audience with delightful anecdotes that he wins himself a lot of good will.

A middle-aged Hungarian conductor named Santos, a musician's musician rather than an international superstar, is summoned to Paris to conduct Tannhauser for the "Opera Europa" (read Paris Opera). Used to the factory-like conditions of a pre-1989 Communist arts apparatus, Santos is soon up to his neck in the dither, dross, and occasional gratifications of democracy. Orchestra members appear and disappear according to the vagaries of union contract clauses instead of the needs of the production; the opera house's two impresarios scheme against each other, using Santos as a pawn; singers are on the make, professionally and sexually, and Santos himself becomes embroiled in a love affair with his star soprano that threatens to wreck his marriage.

Writer-director Istvan Szabo, himself Hungarian, is a masterful, wonderfully sardonic observer of how individuals interact with, struggle against, do or don't survive under powerful organizations. Santos (played by Niels Arestrup with both force and subtlety) is neither worm nor schemer. He is an artist trying to create under conditions that are very strange for him. And the first third of Meeting Venus is exhilaratingly and painfully funny as Santos, a grown-up Alice, moves through the curiouser and curiouser Wonderland of an art world that is both state-sponsored and capitalistic. The directorial inventions are as acute as the skill with which the actors fulfill them: Santos, demanding his salary from a particularly malevolent backstage bureaucrat, must bend to speak under a glass partition that screens the paymaster's office; so, even when he tries to argue his case firmly, he is physically bowing to the little god of the account books. A rehearsal pianist, profusely apologizing that union rules prevent him from granting the conductor much needed rehearsal time, simultaneously locks the piano so that Santos can't play it either. A globe-trotting tenor (fine comic performance by Jay O. Sanders), given his blocking by the director, identifies each move with one of the many Tannhauser productions he's already done. Director: "Move downstage on that phrase." Tenor: "Great! That's how we did it in San Francisco!" Director: "Now sing the rest of the aria kneeling." Tenor: "Berlin! I love it! I love it! Berlin was a wonderful production!"

If such were the sum of Meeting Venus, it would be one of the best comic tributes to the theatrical life ever filmed. But, Szabo, alas, has higher ambitions and the middle third of this movie sinks under those ambitions. They are summed up by the movie's title. You may recall that Tannhauser is about a poet-knight who experiences poetry-inspiring passion in the arms of the goddess Venus but finds his position in an orderly, Christian, family-oriented society undermined by his forbidden knowledge. Szabo tries to create a neat parallel to the myth with his modern story. Santos is supposed to be a Tannhauser with a nice doctor-wife and daughter waiting for him back in Budapest, while his soprano-mistress, played by Glenn Close, is meant to be his Venus, erotically inspiring the conductor to the heights of art but also destroying his happy bourgeois marriage.

The parallel just doesn't work. For one thing, Tannhauser lived in a homogeneous society. His songs earned him a death sentence because they proved he had lain with Venus, a definite no-no for any Christian knight. But Santos lives in the globetrotting, ethnically diverse and ethically relaxed world of international opera production and the denizens of that world not only don't condemn him for his extramarital affair, they show him a tolerance bordering on indifference. And why shouldn't they? They're all having affairs of their own! True, Santos's wife is ready to show him the door. but her rage isn't inspired by any Venusian influence. She's just a wife who's been betrayed once too often. (The film makes it clear that Santos has had other liaisons.) This marital blow-up would have taken place if Santos had been an adulterous doctor, lawyer, or truck driver. It has no bearing on his profession and does not fulfill the putative theme of the film.

Second, Glenn Close, fine actress though she is, cannot radiate and overwhelm as her character must if the love story is to make any sense. (This soprano is the type that turns cautious men into midnight door-batterers who must be carted off by hotel security.) Close is versatile enough to play both psychotics (Fatal Attraction) and salt-of-the-earth paragons (Sarah, Plain and Tall), but theater-animal imperiousness a la Maria Callas is simply not in her line.

But, in the last half hour, by focusing once again on the politics of theater production and scanting romance, Meeting Venus revives. The opera's opening night is portrayed with suspense and wit, but it's too bad that Szabo couldn't resist a parting allegorical touch: when Santos conducts the closing notes of Wagner's work, his baton flowers just as Tannhauser's staff flowers under the blessing of God. But Tannhauser is saved by the intercession of his dead fiancee while Santos gets his show on the road only with a lot of hard work and some pretty slick finessing of union regulations. It is Santos's job to conduct heavenly choruses but I wish his creator, Istvan Szabo, would keep his feet on the ground.