Ai Weiwei’s Turandot is a majorly disappointing and thin look behind the scenes of the dissident artist’s first attempt at directing an opera, a modern retelling of Puccini’s controversial, unfinished classic at Rome’s Teatro Dell’Opera. It’s less a look into a famous artist working outside of their comfort zone and more of a glorified press kit for the Teatro Dell’Opera.
Although Weiwei (who doesn’t like music much, let alone opera) faces a steep learning curve and the COVID pandemic of 2020 derails the show only a month into preparations, director Maxim Derevianko shies away from any kind of tension or backstage drama. To hear it from this film, everything behind the scenes was sunshine and rainbows, which sounds extremely disingenuous when talking about any production, let alone one being directed by someone who doesn’t care for opera and seems to have been hired with the express purpose of making a splash. Weiwei, in the few moments he actually deigns to speak on camera, always appears disinterested in talking about his vision for Turandot. This leaves it up to close collaborators, like choreographer Chiang Ching and composers Alejo Pèrez and Oksana Lyniv (whose connection to her Ukrainian homeland providing more context and heart to the show than Weiwei does) to fill in a lot of the gaps, while suits from the opera house speak about how wonderful it is to be doing something outside the box.
Those are nice sentiments, but the lack of stakes in Ai Weiwei’s Turandot (and a few moments that feel culturally and socially out of touch, like the artist’s appreciation for Julian Assange and a rant about COVID restrictions from a talking head) make this akin to watching a featurette on a DVD for a production the viewer will never get to see in full. It’s startlingly empty, with most of its substance coming from the rehashing of Weiwei’s struggles with the Chinese government, which has been done to death by this point in other documentaries, several of which have already played this festival. It’s tiresome, pretentious, and in no way improves upon what it must’ve been like to be in the room for the production, either in the audience or backstage. It also doesn’t improve on any of the other films previously made about Ai Weiwei or any of the documentaries the man has produced himself.
