A Little Magic in Castle Gate | Rigoletto (1993)

[farina]

Title: A Little Magic in Castle Gate
Fandom: Rigoletto (1993)
Words: 3,180 words
Summary: Saturday, August 10, 1974. Friends and relatives return home to commemorate the death of Castle Gate, a century-old mining town forced to relocate in the name of industry. Bonnie Nelson joins them in saying goodbye.
Pairing/Character: Bonnie, Ari Ribaldi (Rigoletto), Tim
Warnings: None if you watched the film.
Rating: T
Genre: Genfic, historical light fantasy, reminiscing/memories, saying goodbye to a place you used to call home.

Notes:

Want to watch the film? It's here in mediocre quality (but at least it's free).

I CAN'T BELIEVE I WROTE THIS. I was seriously so shocked that I could not find a single fanfic for this film; it seemed like it would have been ripe for at least a handful, if not about the main character then at least exploring the weird fantasy elements the film offered through Rigoletto and the mirror he gave Porter.

Anyway, I couldn't get over the fact that I had THOUGHTS that I wanted to write about, and so here we are. A historical fantasy "many years later" where Bonnie is still the main character.

The film never specifies a year so I went with 1933 and decided Bonnie looked around 13 for the film. This story takes place in 1974, when the actual town of Castle Gate was forced to leave. Some of the details of this story were actually pulled from a 1974 newspaper article about the "commemorative event" that took place before the town was erased from the map by McCulloch Oil, including the food served and the songs they sang, as well as the graffiti on the wall in the Amusement Hall.

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Please forgive any clumsiness in this story. I understand very well that Ribaldi and Rigoletto are the same person, but I think in a real-world setting where the characters experienced what occurred in the film, things might be very confusing and I was trying to convey it in the story.

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Maybe I'm just a sentimental person but I find it really difficult to say goodbye to places that once meant a lot to me and I don't think I'm alone in having that experience. This story is mostly about Bonnie saying goodbye to Castle Gate, and a little about her short relationship with Ari Ribaldi/Rigoletto, who taught her to sing and thus helped her win a state singing competition.

Something truly fascinating about Rigoletto (1993) is that the writer and director of the film (Leo Paur) had a very specific vision he was trying to convey with this film. He talked about how as a child passing through Castle Gate, it felt like a magical place. He cast his brother Joseph, an opera singer, in the lead role. He wrote the role of Bonnie after his own mother. He wanted this film to feel emblematic I think of himself and that sentiment, the writer's "inner beauty" is confirmed by Joseph in an interview.

Despite all of this, all Rigoletto does in this film (if you take it at face value) is teach Bonnie to sing. She wins a competition but we don't see how winning it might change her life, or if it even can.

I like the fantasy elements too much to imagine the "tale" being told between the scenes of Bonnie reading the fairytale book are just her imagination. I want to believe it's real, and I think anyone else watching it does, too.

So then, what good did any of this do? Even if you view Mr. Ribaldi as a sort-of Christ-like figure, if you take everything at face value this story feels like a huge and awful tragedy. No matter what, Mr. Ribaldi still gets more or less beat to the brink of death by the very people he's trying to save. There's also all the guilt going around to contend with. I do think the townsfolk deserve to suffer it for their sins, but Georgie would feel it too and that doesn't seem fair.

Anyway, all that trouble and Mr. Ribaldi taught Bonnie to sing? That's it? No. Mr. Ribaldi's goal of finding someone to help him break his curse aside, I do believe he taught her a little more than that, and those lessons went a much greater distance with her in her adult life.

I wanted the singing to still feel sweet (singing to her children, at her first husband's funeral, to the grandbabies) but I also didn't get the feeling from the film that learning how to sing better was meant to be the big lifechanging event in Bonnie's life; it was everything else she learned that summer, which I tried to talk about in this story just a bit.

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I took some creative liberties with Ribaldi/Rigoletto and different characters' viewpoints on whether they were the same man or not.

Of course Mr. Ribaldi is Rigoletto (Gabriella calls him Ari, so maybe his actual name is Ari Rigoletto) but I did not have Bonnie think of him using that name because she never really knew him by it.

Think of it kind of like how you still probably refer to your school teachers by Mr./Ms./Miss/Mrs. [Name] even if you've been out of school for 30 years.

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Anyway, while I imagine Bonnie has some attachment to the town, I think her biggest attachment to Castle Gate as a place would be the mansion Ribaldi bought and lived in for a time just because it ended up being such an important memory/time for her.

And of course I have the characters refer to it as the "old Ribaldi place", because to them, it's what that house became.

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Thanks for reading if anyone was brave enough to do that! LOL