Amadeus - Director's Cut

Here's a paradox: nothing is more of its time than a vision of the past or future. When artists erase everything they are conscious of as contemporary, what remains is the unconscious essence.

Here's another paradox: no artist more precisely conveys the spirit of a country than the foreigner who is working to make it home. Though set in the 18th century and filmed in his native Prague, Milos Forman's Amadeus - now with an extra 20 minutes in its "director's cut" - is patently a film by an American of the early 1980s.

The restored footage itensifies the humiliation of Mozart's wife, Constanze (the film's least selfconscious performance, from Elizabeth Berridge) by Salieri, the senior composer mortified by the mirror of his own mediocrity that he sees in Mozart's fluent genius.

Other than that, it's a matter of extending scenes in the opera house. The flips of choreographer Twyla Tharp's dancers in Seraglio are more break dancing than baroque, just as Mozart's flamboyant frock coats and implausibly tinted periwigs are as much Adam Ant as Amadeus.

The stops-out acting (F Murray Abraham the darkly dignified Salieri, Tom Hulce the gauche, giggling Mozart) is to be savoured, but the film's popularity now seems as curiously dated as that of Rubik's Cube.

In reshaping his 1970s play for the screen, Peter Shaffer discarded a discourse on inspiration for a shallower one on status.

The conflict between the brash free spirit of Mozart and the pompous Establishment is given New World/Old World definition by Hulce's American accent and the English tones of fathers and fuddy-duddies.

Where else in the early 1980s were we transfixed by a struggle for court supremacy between an impeccably correct European and an American brat possessed of genius?

Salieri versus Mozart is Borg versus McEnroe.

Amadeus - Director's Cut
Cert: certPG