Bel Canto

Bel Canto (2018) is a drama directed by Paul Weitz that you can watch online on iFILM. Julianne Moore plays world-famous soprano Roxane Coss, flown to South America for a single private concert. Ken Watanabe is the Japanese industrialist who bankrolled the evening. Armed men crash the party before the applause dies down.

Guerrilla fighters seize the mansion and demand the release of political prisoners. Weeks pass. Hostages and captors share the same rooms, the same meals, the same silence — and the lines drawn on day one slowly dissolve. Roxane keeps singing. It turns out to be the only language everyone understands.

The film adapts Ann Patchett's novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize — a book about how music and proximity can do what politics cannot. Weitz is more interested in the strange tenderness that grows between strangers under duress than in any action set piece. A quiet, character-driven film for viewers who don't need a gunfight every ten minutes. Stream Bel Canto (2018) online on iFILM.