Amadeus

Amadeus

Amadeus is one of those films in which you can analyse every single detail. The depth of the characters, the music as another character, the monologues of Saliery becoming dialogs with the priests’ expressions, etc. Nevertheless, all of those details have been already analysed by the best critics in the world and it’s really hard to make a new point of view in this area without anycontamination of them. That’s way I decided to introduce an “original” point of view of Amadeus. I’m going to analyse the way that the wigs help us to understand the personalities of the characters in the film. For sure, I am not the first one who has focused its analyses in this pattern, (Theodor Pistek won the Oscar for best custom design) but I didn’t read anything about this before.

In thefirst scenes of the film you don’t even notice the importance of the wigs; because in the mental hospital nobody is wearing a wig, also neither Saliery nor the priest are wearing a wig, but when you have the perspective of the hole film you notice that the fault of wigs in those scenes is not a casualty, the director is trying to open the Salierys heart through the confession to the priest, thewigs are a disguise. The priest is not wearing a wig because it wouldn’t be helpful for Saliery to open his heart to a priest disguised. As you can appreciate in the scene, Saliery isn’t wearing a wig neither, because in this part of the film, he doesn’t want to be disguised; he is looking for redemption, for forgiveness, he is admitting his sins, he is showing his soul to the priest and the onlyway to show it, is being himself without any masks.

A few scenes later we can see that the wig of Saliery’s father is darker than the other ones. In the whole film the characters whom are “evils” or the ones who are against of the main characters’ wishes are wearing dark wigs. The first one is Saliery’s father, who is his barrier to become a compositor, then the Italian consultants of theemperor, they don’t like Mozart and they want to throw him out of Vienna, also Mozart’s father, who wants his son back to Salzburg. They are all wearing dark wigs, symbolising the fear of their personalities, Milos Forman is playing with the colours to transmit sensations. In the other hand, the characters that “help” Mozart in the films are wearing white wigs. The emperor, who is always wearing aperfect white wig and who is “helping” Mozart (in a way) during all his life, the German emperors’ consultant, who is against the Italian consultants because he wants an opera written in Germany and of course, Constanza. By the way, Constanza is not wearing the same stile of wigs during the film, her character has an evolution and that evolution is also reflected in her wigs. In the first scenes she isalways wearing white wigs, the first time that she is not is in the end of the first concert in Vienna “The abduction” (From The Seraglio, Turkish Finale). Mozart is talking with the emperor about the concert everybody is looking at them. The main singer, the soprano, is wearing a very big and blonde wig, (we already now that Mozart and the singer are more than friends) suddenly between theaudience of the concert, Constanza and her mother appear. The wig of Constanza here is not completely white but is not also dark, the contrast between her wig and the soprano’s wig is very strong, nevertheless, the big and blonde soprano’s wig is completely exaggerate; it’s a symbol of frivolity. A few scenes later Constanza meets Saliery trying to find a job for her husband Mozart, her wig here isblack. This meeting is a bad idea; we, the audience, know it because we know Salieri’s personality, but Constanza doesn’t. To emphasis the bad idea of the meeting (for the audience) she is wearing a dark wig. In the next scene with Saliery, Constanza is meeting him to sleep with him, because that is the price she has to pay for the job. Here Constanza is wearing a white wig. She starts to undress...