90 min, MPAA Rating: R, Color, Available on videocassette and DVD.

This film is a labor of love by British producer Don Boyd, who wanted to make as a live-action equivalent to Fantasia, only using famous operatic arias as its inspiration instead of classical music. Predictably, the results are uneven: funny, sensual and outrageous all at the same time, and much of it doesn't make sense so the best advice I can give is to give your logical brain a rest and just sit back and enjoy. This is a movie you will either love or just plain hate. A cadre of ten internationally respected directors (Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, Bill Bryden, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Franc Roddam, Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Charles Sturridge, and Julien Temple) each contribute a segment. To their credit, none of the directors chose to just go ahead and film his aria in a straightforward, traditional way:

Godard uses Lully's Armide as an excuse for a segment about bodybuilders and two nubile young observers.

I particularly enjoyed Franc Roddam's interpretation of Liebestod, from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. This truely poignant episode has Bridget Fonda - in her first film - and James Mathers as young lovers who arrive in Las Vegas, drive slowly and (given the music) sadly down Glitter Gulch, check into a cheap hotel room, make love, and kill themselves.

In another moving segment directed by Bill Bryden, John Hurt mimes a moving rendition of Caruso's aria from I Pagliacci.

A truly bizzare episode by Nicolas Roeg gives us his vision of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera starring his wife, Theresa Russell, made up as a man, in a story based on the attempted assassination of King Zog of Albania in 1931.

Robert Altman's segment on Rameau's Abaris ou les Boreades re-creates the Parisian opening night in 1734 at the Ranelagh Theater, where he imagines the audience as being filled with a raffish and perhaps diseased assortment of lowlifes and the decadent.

Ken Russell chooses Puccini's Turandot, and uses the British pinup model Linzi Drew as his subject. She imagines her body is being adorned by jewels, but wakes up in an operating room where she is receiving emergency care after a car crash. The mixture is typical of Russell's taste for exoticism and sensation.

But my favorite episode is the one by Julien Temple, the brash young British director. He shoots his illustration of Verdi's Rigoletto in the famous Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, California, and stars Buck Henry as a movie producer who sneaks away from home for a weekend romp with his lover, not know that his wife (Beverly D'Angelo) is in the same hotel doing the same thing. Their close almost-encounters are poetry in motion and a sheer comic delight to watch.

At the end of Aria one must decide, I suppose, what it all means. The film shows of the future talents of many young stars-to-be (Fonda, Russell, Hurt, D'Angelo, Elizabeth Hurley, and others) and is fun to watch almost as a satire of itself; as a project in which the tension between the directors and their material allows them to poke a little fun at their own styles and obsessions. Think of it as the first MTV version of opera.