When you ask a celebrated film director to stage one of the cornerstones of the operatic repertoire, the last thing you want is timid reticence. What you look for is boldness, colour, vision.

Anthony Minghella's English National Opera production of Puccini's Madam Butterfly is certainly bold and colourful, and it has its visionary moments. The sloping mirror that forms the back of the stage creates some telling split-screen effects, and the images of Butterfly that open and close the opera are heart-breaking in their directness. So far, so good.

This is an opera with everything: a clash of cultures, under-age sex, single motherhood, forced adoption, suicide. Yet Minghella seems reluctant to deliver the story straight, and for every telling detail there are a dozen touches of kitsch. As for having Butterfly's three-year-old son played by a puppet, it is either crass misjudgment or a masterstroke. At least the puppet looks involved, which is rarely the case when the role is taken by an overawed schoolboy.

For this revival, staged by Minghella's wife Carolyn Choa, you sense that so much attention has been lavished on peripherals that the singers have been left to get by with standard issue Puccini-isms.

Conductor David Parry whips the orchestra into a fine frenzy, sometimes overwhelming the voices, but the emotional temperature is slow to rise.

Perhaps the most expressive singing comes from Karen Cargill as Suzuki, Butterfly's maid, which is not quite what Puccini had in mind. As Pinkerton, the American sailor who is Butterfly's downfall, Gwyn Hughes Jones is more abrasive than tender, and at first it is hard to believe that Judith Howarth's Butterfly can have fallen for him.

As her situation gets desperate, though, Howarth locates the intensity that finally hits home, so that Butterfly's freeze-frame suicide seems horribly real.

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