Madame Butterfly is a 1995 musical film, based on the 1904 opera Madama Butterfly with music by Giacomo Puccini and libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It is written and directed by Frédéric Mitterrand, and produced by Daniel Toscan du Plantier and Pierre-Olivier Bardet. The cast features soprano Huang Ying as Cio-Cio-san, tenor Richard Troxell as Pinkerton, mezzo-soprano Ning Liang as Suzuki, and bass-baritone Richard Cowan as Sharpless. The score was adapted, arranged, and conducted by James Conlon.
The film was an international co-production between French, British, and German companies. It was released by Les Films du Losange in France on 22 November 1995, and received positive reviews. At the 21st César Awards, the film won Best Costume Design and was nominated for Best Production Design.
As filming in Japan proved prohibitively expensive, the film was shot in Tunisia, on Lake Ichkeul and in Bizerte.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a positive review, writing "This beautiful new film version of âÂÂMadame Butterflyâ is not a revisionist approach; it films PucciniâÂÂs opera more or less as it was intended to be seen, and of course that is what we want . The approach is traditional, the pace is attentive, and yet the emotion is still all there."
Andy Seiler of USA Today wrote "Besides a visual combination of authentic Japanese realism and picturesque, dream-like cinematography that matches the lushness of Puccini's music, director Frederic Mitterrand gives the opera a distinctively cinematic gravity and subtlety."
In contrast, Christian Leblé of Libération gave the film a negative review, writing "[The film] does not have to justify any point of view, nor any aesthetic. (...) All this to say that one comes away stunned, tired by the melodrama and by so many decibels, not particularly happy."
On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 70% based on reviews from 10 critics.