Visually, it operates on three levels. Most of the opera is shot in full-colour studio circumstances on traditional, atmospheric sets with a film-friendly spareness, seen through a small but effective vocabulary of shots. Characters are often viewed from overhead, showing them in the context of their particular world and also creating vaguely abstract screen pictures (particularly when the train of Angela Gheorghiu’s dress is arranged just so). Often, entrances aren’t made through doors or gates but from a dark netherworld. Close-ups go places that in-performance videos usually do not: after Tosca stabs Scarpia, her safe-passage document in his still-clenched hands effectively dominates the screen, along with her painstaking efforts to prise open his fingers. In the Act 3 Tosca/Cavaradossi duet, the depth of their love is evident in the intimate close-ups between the two singers. Until then, they could well have been a hot power couple. Here, one feels a true bond.

The other two levels are grainier colour footage (possibly shot on location) that glimpse the world through the eyes of key characters. Framing all of this are black-and-white visits to the recording sessions on which the film is based. It all flows together with surprising ease. If nothing else, the visual variety has a practical function: though Tosca is Puccini’s most dramatically tight opera, pacing can drag by cinematic standards. I’m less sure about other ways Jacquot embraces the medium’s artificiality. At times, the voices are heard on the film’s soundtrack but the on-screen characters speak their lines.

Ruggero Raimondi’s Scarpia is the most assured presence. Though all of the characters find inner resources they didn’t know were there, Raimondi shows Scarpia seized by his sexual imperative. Vocally, he’s electrifying, and gives extra heat to his admission that Tosca ‘makes me forget God’ – and what a dimension that adds. Born to sing Mario, Roberto Alagna is also as dashing as one could hope for. But as savvy as Gheorghiu is on stage, she tends to go over the top on screen, with wild gestures and bug eyes. What a pity, since her physical beauty easily registers, even though, in the 10-years-later interview she gives among the ‘extras’, she seems to disguise herself with a hipster hat and earrings that could double as wind chimes. Vocally, her medium-weight lyric soprano comes across surprisingly well, even in spinto-esque passages. Conductor Antonio Pappano encourages more all-around amplitude than one would want in a studio setting. It feels like a shout-fest at times. But these are secondary problems in a cinematic package that warrants repeated viewing.