Bel Canto: Julianne Moore and Ken Watanabe in operatic hostage film

It might seem hard to make a sympathetic film about terrorists in a post-9/11 world, but director Paul Weitz takes on the challenge in a new film based on a real-life hostage situation which took place in Peru in 1996.

Academy Award-winning actress Julianne Moore plays Roxane Coss, a famous opera singer who finds herself taken hostage when she agrees to perform at the Japanese embassy in an unnamed South American country. At first the members of the insurgent militia seem utterly ruthless, but as the hostages and soldiers spend time together in lockdown, it becomes clear that many of the rebels have resorted to desperate measures in order to battle against an oppressive government.

The film, focusing on multi-national diplomatic crisis, has attracted a star-studded international cast, with Ken Watanabe (Inception, Memoirs of a Geisha) playing wealthy industrialist Katsumi Hosokawa and Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others, Bridge of Spies) as Joachim Messner, a Swiss Red Cross negotiator. Weitz also decided that the characters should speak their own languages wherever possible, meaning that the film is mostly subtitled.

But it is the universal language of music that reigns supreme as it becomes apparent that Roxane Coss’s mellifluous voice (the voice of American soprano Renée Fleming) is the only thing that can quell the anger between the two sides. It seems that a plot with this much melodrama will play out with decadent operatic allusions.