PARIS, June 27 — It is no longer thought daring for film-makers to direct opera. Roman Polanski and William Friedkin first did so some years ago. Anthony Minghella and Michael Haneke tried their hand more recently, and Woody Allen and David Cronenberg will soon have a go. Invariably the idea of opera house managers is to add some screen buzz (and, they hope, draw new audiences) to their standard repertory.

On the other hand Gérard Mortier, the director of the Paris National Opera, was taking a risk when he invited the Serb film director Emir Kusturica to create a new work here. Put simply, Mr. Mortier, who will take over as general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera in 2009, was also asking a traditionally conservative audience to embrace a so-called Gypsy punk opera, with amplified orchestra and voices, pop-up décor, a flock of geese and a heavy dose of Balkan magical realism.

With “Le Temps des Gitans,” or “Time of the Gypsies,” an adaptation of Mr. Kusturica’s 1988 award-winning movie of the same name, it is this idiosyncratic world that has been brought to the stage of the Bastille Opera.

Closer to riotous spectacle than lyric opera, the 100-minute one-act show is held together as much by imaginative staging as by a score alternating between folksy Gypsy music and hard rock. The voices blasting out of banks of loudspeakers in turn seem closer to those of musical comedy than in Mozart or Verdi.

“The opera is going to be how Monty Python could have imagined opera,” Mr. Kusturica (pronounced koos-toor-EET-sa), 52, told reporters during rehearsals. “Sometimes it is a parody of opera, sometimes it is a self-parody.”

It is also, in a sense, what Mr. Kusturica’s cultish followers might have expected of the Sarajevo-born director of “When Father Was Away on Business” and “Underground,” which each won the top prize at Cannes in 1985 and 1995, respectively, as well as of “Black Cat, White Cat,” “Arizona Dream” and “Time of the Gypsies,” perhaps his most popular film, for which he won the Palme d’Or in 1989 for best director.

Well, the gamble appears to have paid off, at least judging by the ovation given at Tuesday’s opening night to Mr. Kusturica’s stage adaptation of “Time of the Gypsies.” And if the audience looked younger than customary at the Bastille Opera, this too is part of Mr. Mortier’s wager: He has scheduled 15 performances, 50 percent more than the norm, and is charging half the usual price for seats.

The libretto, written by Nenad Jankovic, simplifies the plot of the movie to the ill-fated love story between two teenage Gypsies, Perhan (Stevan Andjelkovic) and Azra (Milica Todorovic), along with Perhan’s involvement with Ahmed (Mr. Jankovic), a sleazy villager who has grown rich in Milan by kidnapping Gypsy children and turning them into beggars.

Perhan invites trouble by following Ahmed to Milan, lured by the promises of quick wealth. When he returns to his village, he finds that Azra has become pregnant by his uncle, whom he duly kills. Perhan marries Azra but gives away her baby, only to discover a few years later that the boy is begging in Milan. Finally, when Perhan finds that his sister has become one of Ahmed’s streetwalkers, a shootout leaves the stage covered in corpses.

Written without dialogue or recitatives (and sung in the Roma language with French subtitles), the opera is told through a series of set-piece scenes, each shaped by Mr. Kusturica’s extraordinary visual imagination. And while this is the first time he has directed onstage, his movie experience of working with crowds, most memorably in noisy village wedding parties, has evidently served him well.

The opera’s music is also no stranger to him. For the past 20 years, between making movies, Mr. Kusturica has played guitar in a punk and techno rock group called the No Smoking Orchestra. For this occasion the 10-man band shares the pit of the Bastille Opera with the Garbage Serbian Philharmonia which, despite its bizarre name, uses classical music instruments.

Composed by Dejan Sparavalo, Mr. Jankovic and Mr. Kusturica’s son, Stribor, the score is driven along by oompah rhythms typical of Gypsy songs and dances, occasionally interrupted by electric guitar solos and rock music, much of it catchy enough for some audience members to clap to the beat (surely a first at the Paris Opera).

What makes this show roll along is the circuslike mood of the crowded stage, with dwarfs, jugglers, acrobats and musicians variously accompanied by a tractor, caravans, village huts that lift off the ground, three stuffed turkeys and the ever-present (and remarkably well-behaved) flock of geese.(Ivana Protic designed the sets and Nebojsa Lipanovic the costumes.)

Mr. Kusturica occasionally projects movie excerpts, some from “Time of the Gypsies,” but also one showing Robert de Niro playing with a gun in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and even a sequence of the former Argentine soccer star Diego Armando Maradona scoring a famous goal, taken from Kusturica’s own documentary, “Maradona.”

For the scenes set in Milan, the impressive backdrop is the facade of the Duomo, the city’s cathedral, from which emerge dancing nuns and priests. It is there that the final scene takes place: a dozen characters (some killed only minutes earlier), attached to wires, are lifted to hang beside the saintly statuary decorating the cathedral.

When the curtain came down, the Bastille Opera’s audience was quick on its feet, cheering Mr. Kusturica and his team. And while it seemed like a good number of Mr. Kusturica’s loyal fans were in the crowd, Mr. Mortier, for one, must have felt relief. Since taking over the Paris Opera in 2004, his penchant for shocking the bourgeoisie has brought boos as often as applause.

If “Time for the Gypsies” proves to be a critical as well as box-office hit, though, it is just the kind of show he might take to the City Opera. Mr. Mortier likes to stir things up, and Mr. Kusturica knows how to do so, onstage as well as off. More Articles in Arts »

June 28 (Bloomberg) – Gypsies are, of course, not unknown on the opera stage. Yet no opera before has been sung in Romany, their language.

“Le Temps des Gitans”, or “The Time of the Gypsies”, is not really an opera. It's a succession of pop songs with only the thinnest of threads to bind them together.

That didn't prevent the Paris Opera from shepherding the project. The June 26 world premiere and the 12 subsequent performances are part of a wider-ranging project – to reach out to an audience that has never set foot in an opera house.

The first such attempt two years ago, Alain Platel's “Wolf”, was a hash of Mozart operas and chamber music with as many canine as human participants. It was an embarrassing mess. “Le Temps des Gitans” met with a standing ovation from a rapturous audience.

The “punk opera”, as it is misleadingly called, is based on the eponymous movie by the Bosnian filmmaker Emir Kusturica. The film won him the best-director award at the Cannes Festival in 1989. Kusturica also directs the stage version.

Both versions relate the story of Perhan, an orphan who is brought up by his larger-than-life, pipe-smoking, faith-healing grandmother. Trying to convince the mother of his beloved Azra that he can support a family, he gets involved in his sleazy uncle's business – the exploitation of Gypsy children smuggled from Yugoslavia to Italy where they are put on the streets to beg and steal for their masters. The adventure ends badly.

New Score

The movie was a hit in Yugoslavia in the days when the country was falling apart, and got rave reviews elsewhere for its stunning images, intoxicating mix of comedy and tragedy and the unaffected vitality of the mostly non-professional cast.

Not the least of the movie's attractions was the enchanting music by Goran Bregovic. Because Kusturica and Bregovic are no longer on speaking terms, a new score had to be written. It's a joint effort by Dejan Sparavalo, Nenad Jankovic and Stribor Kusturica, the director's son.

Kusturica Jr. is a drummer in the “No Smoking Orchestra”, the 12-member band his father joined in 1986 as a bass player. The style of the group, which is one of the two orchestras in the Bastille Opera pit, has been described as “Gypsy techno-rock” or “new primitivism”.

Retro pop with Balkan flavors probably comes closer to what you hear. If you want to get a better idea, Decca has just released a CD with 14 of the score's 22 numbers.

Butcher on Stage

The second orchestra bears the proud name “The Garbage Serbian Philharmonia”. The only difference I noticed between the two ensembles was that the Garbage men have a conductor, Zoran Komadina. At the curtain call, he appeared wearing a butcher's apron.

The singers are members of a company specializing in Serb folk music. None of their voices is remarkable, yet they do know how to use a microphone: When they don't sing forte, they sing fortissimo.

If you haven't seen the movie, you may have trouble making sense of the story. Ivana Protic, the set designer, has transformed the rural, poor village into a fairground with jugglers, garish lights and trailers. Only the backdrop, an endearingly naive bank of the Danube, and a dozen amazingly disciplined geese remind you of the original location.

Short film excerpts evoke the movie's atmosphere. Kusturica doesn't see any harm in quoting famous colleagues. To demonstrate Perhan's lapsing into crime, he shows Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's film “Taxi Driver”. At the end, the poor people fly away to a better world, just like in Vittorio De Sica's “Miracle in Milan”.

“Le Temps des Gitans” is in repertory at the Bastille Opera, Paris, through July 15. The matinee on July 14, Bastille Day, is free.

(Jorg von Uthmann is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

PARÍS.- El estreno de la primera ópera punk del cineasta serbobosnio Emir Kusturica en la Ópera de la Bastilla en París fue recibido con una gran ovación el martes por la noche. La obra de más de dos horas de duración se basa en la exitosa película 'Tiempo de gitanos', por la que Kusturica ganó en 1989 el premio al mejor director en el Festival de Cannes.

Cuando el cineasta salió al escenario tras la representación, el público se puso en e pie y aplaudió. También su grupo de “rock gitano”, la No Smoking Orchestra, fue ovacionado, así como la orquesta sinfónica The Garbage Serbian Philarmonia.

Ambas agrupaciones acompañaron la trágica historia del niño gitano Perhan con un salvaje y divertido punk étnico y con melancólicos sonidos balcánicos.

“Creo que la ópera me gusta más que el cine. La ópera me permite saltar al abstracto y se corresponde por eso mucho más con mi concepción artística. Me siento bien en este mundo abstracto”, dijo el director. Y así Kusturica sume al espectador en un colorido mundo operístico, en el que se baila y se bebe mucho y en el que junto con niños gitanos jugando al fútbol recorren el escenario gansos graznando.

Para los papeles protagonista del joven gitano Perhan y su novia Azra, Kusturica, que nació en Sarajevo, eligió a Stevan Andelkovic y Milic Todorovic, dos jóvenes prometedores cantantes de su patria.

La representación se nutre sobre todo de la música. Mientras en la película Kusturica podía jugar con la cámara para crear dinamismo, tensión y sorpresa, ahora el ex bajista de rock recurre al pop balcánico, el jazz, el folk gitano, el punk y el rock, que mezcla en un fuego de artificio acústico, que genera mucho ambiente y ritmo pero también seriedad y melancolía. También está lograda la mezcla entre los típicos instrumentos de rock con los instrumentos de cuerdas y de vientos de la orquesta.

La obra no tiene mucho de ópera en el sentido clásico. “Posiblemente se ubique más bien entre la opereta y el musical. Pero todo eso hay que verlo más bien en el espíritu de un Monty Python”, dijo Kusturica antes del estreno.

El cineasta reconoció que presentarse en un teatro tan establecido como la Bastilla le dio algo de miedo. Pero aseguró que las condiciones de trabajo fueron óptimas. “Nosotros no somos necesariamente puntuales y bien organizados siempre. Y ellos aceptaron nuestro ritmo y nos dejaron total libertad”. El trabajo fue muy divertido, lo que se nota en su ópera punk. La producción se podrá ver otras 12 veces hasta el 15 de julio.