Its the big sensation and its sweepin' the nation. Moviegoers are mad for it, they're wild in the aisles, transmuted into mindless, tumescent creatures in the terminal stages of acute Lakmania. I know. I'm one of them.

For me it started two years ago (it seems so much longer) when I happened to catch a late-night showing of The Hunger on HBO, a kinky little picture featuring Catherine Deneuve as a milleniums-old ambisexual vampiress. The highlight for me - heaven knows, for all of us - was the scene in which Susan Sarandon is seduced by Deneuve to the strains of the charming barcarole from Lakme, the opera by the French composer Leo Delibes. At this point the erotic power of the visual, increased exponentially by the exquisitely sensuous music, reaches dangerously psychoactive levels. Perhaps the opium-soaked Parisians of the 19th century, with their sensory threshholds wrenched way out of whack, experienced similar effects when Lakme was first produced in 1883. The romantic melodrama, with its exotic East Indian setting and tragic cross-cultural love story (not unlike the later Madame Butterfly) had all the elements that the jaded Parisian opera goer in search of moist frissons was yearning for.



In The Hunger, Deneuve, at the piano, explains that the barcarole from Act I is scored for two women. "Sounds like a love song", says Sarandon. Yowie. The two alluring actresses execute a series of slow kisses. I gripped the night table and gasped for air. Above the soundtrack, you could hear the creak of cable-watchers' toes curling all over the city. I should have seen the writing on the wall.

The fever subsided until a few weeks later when I went to what used to be called an "art house" to see the Canadian film I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. Polly, the goony heroine, escapes her humdum life by experiencing moments of aesthetic rapture. To help induce these altered states, she plays a recording of... the charming barcarole from Lakme, the opera by the French composer Leo Delibes. Immediately after the film was over, the sensitive, upscale audience, anxious to undergo similar oceanic bliss, stampeded over to Tower Records to purchase their very own copies of the work. I already had a copy from before.

By then I was living, dreaming Lakme. I could sense its cinematic presence. When a friend asked me to attend a screening of Ridley (Tony's brother) Scott's Someone to Watch Over Me, I acted on a wild hunch and suspended my standing proscription against seeing movies where they let you in for free.

Everyone was there for the same thing. We watched politely for a few minutes as the actors moved like deep-sea fauna through the lushly photographed, wicked deco interiors. Then our chant began, a burbling moan that gradually escalated into a terrible, insistent ostinato: Lack-may, Lack-may, Lack-may....

After sitting through a few classical pieces, several versions of the Gershwin title song and an aria from La Wally, another director's favorite, our collective lust was finally satisfied. Love-struck detective Tom Berenger rushes to the perfumed lair of his high-society sweetie to be comforted not only by gorgeous, unmussable Mimi Rogers but also by the charming barcarole from Lakme, the opera by the French composer Leo Delibes.

Heavy-lidded and woozy, we filed out of the theater well before the picture ended. We gave each other the special Lakmaniac's handshake and staggered out into the mean streets.

Can it be possible that this century-old music from Lakme, this obscure cultural object, has again found its moment in history, has somehow fallen into the narrowing groove of modern consiousness? Is this where the fin de siecle of Delibes, with its trunkful of sensuality, decadence and chinoisrie syncs up with our own time? Quel mystere to ponder.



Incidentally, a barcarole, as all good Lakmaniacs know, is a kind of song that Venetian gondoliers sing, or an imitation of one. In the opera, the Brahmin's exquisite daughter Lakme and the slave girl Mallika decide to boat downstream in search of blue lotus flowers. Here is a rough translation of the maiden's song:

Under the dense canopy
Where the white jasmine
Blends with the rose
On the flowering bank
Laughing at the morning
Come, let us drift down together
Let us gently glide along
With the enchanting flow
Of the fleeing current
On the rippling surface
With a lazy hand
Let us reach the shore
Where the source sleeps
And the bird sings
Under the dense canopy
Under the white jasmine
Let us drift down together

W-w-wow! I can't stand it, cannot stand it anymore! Operator, please get me L.A., Lakmaniacs Anonomous. Nix it on the dense canopy, cancel the white jasmine. It won't be any picnic, but we've got to fight our way out of this thing. God help us all.