What happens after the curtain falls on the death of Mimi, tragic heroine of Puccini�s La Boh�me? In Thriller, Mimi teams up with the opera�s comic heroine Musetta to investigate her own death. Using Psycho strings, Marxist theory and men in tutus, the film asks whether the Bohemian artists upstairs are complicit in Mimi�s poverty, isolation and death.
The film tells the story of the opera through three times: first following Puccini�s �script,� second looking at the relationships between the characters and lastly by placing Mimi in context as a working-class woman. In the film�s only moment of synchronised sound, Colette Laffont (as Musetta) reads French theory, looking for the cause of her oppression, as Rose English (as Mimi) tries to attract her attention � and gets carried out of the room by the male artists.
A witty and inventive voice-over delivered by Laffont threads together two sets of black-and-white archival images � of women workers and of classic stagings at the Royal Opera House � intercut into the high-contrast black-and-white still and moving images of four actors performing fragments and parodies of scenes from the opera in a bare room. Potter�s background in performance art and contemporary dance shines through in the eloquent gestural language in the film�s mainly still shots, while the tense investigation � shot through with humour � suggests the narrative pleasures of her feature films to come.