Dario Argento's THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA shows the director succumbing to his own instincts
Directed by Dario Argento
Written by Gérard Brach and Dario Argento
Starring Julian Sands, Asia Argento, and Andrea Di Stefano
MPAA Rating: NR
Runtime: 100 minutes
Available from Kino Lorber on June 7
by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer
If I had to pick a favorite director it would likely be Italian horror icon Dario Argento, and his 1998 adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s classic Le Fantôme de l'Opéra has long been on my watchlist. Released in Italy Il fantasma dell'opera, The Phantom of the Opera still seems like an odd choice for the director. His only period film up until that point was the 1973 comedy-drama The Five Days (Le cinque giornate), set in the mid-19th century, and currently the only non-horror/giallo entry in his entire filmography. The idea, though, of Argento recasting Fantôme (itself more a gothic romance than anything else) into a modern horror film was one which I found very intriguing.
As even the most fervent giallo fan will tell you, though, Argento after 1987’s Opera must be approached with caution. The ‘90s were a particularly unfortunate decade for fans of the director, when his uncomfortable relationship with his daughter (and Phantom star) Asia was most on display. Thus it’s not really a surprise when, in the first scene with Asia as the soprano Christine Daaé (after the film opens with an extended sequence tracking The Phantom’s abandonment, as an infant, in the watery catacombs beneath the Opéra de Paris), she’s costumed in a white dress with a sheer bodice that doesn’t leave much to the imagination.
Viewers who are familiar with any of the plethora of Fantôme adaptations (or with the original work itself) should find Argento’s adaptation broadly recognizable. Asia, as mentioned, plays the aspiring prima donna Christine, who develops a clandestine relationship with The Phantom (Sands) while being courted by Baron Raoul De Chagny (Di Stefano). Though, in Argento’s version, The Phantom was a nameless child raised by rats and other “creatures of the underworld” after his abandonment and, though unremarkable in appearance (aside from looking like Julian Sands), has some vaguely-defined psychic powers.
Phantom starts with a bit of a slasher vibe which, had it stuck around, would’ve been an interesting way of approaching the material. Instead, the plot flops around for about an hour until The Phantom takes a sledgehammer to a column in the opera house’s roof and drops a chandelier onto the audience. This somehow ruins the voice of the current prima donna, Carlotta (played by Nadia Rinaldi), and puts Christine in the starring role the next evening. This leads to an onstage confrontation in which a peeping tom ratcatcher outs her as having had sex with The Phantom. A mob of operagoers and gendarmes chase her into the catacombs, where The Phantom delays them until she and Raoul manage to escape.
Of course, if you’re familiar with Fantôme and its adaptations you’ll notice that Brach and Argento’s script adapts only about half of the original story. Notably, this Phantom doesn’t include the famous masquerade in which The Phantom appears dressed as the Red Death. I was genuinely looking forward to seeing how Argento would handle this sequence, which I thought would have appealed to someone with his visual flair, and was very disappointed it wasn’t included.
Argento is, I believe, thought of as a “shock” filmmaker whose notoriety came from the amount of blood and violence he put on the screen. While that’s certainly a part of his work, I think his enduring appeal lies instead in his inventive and unexpected choices. The bizarre psychedelic soundtracks, the lurid colors, the uncomfortably intimate close-ups and beautifully composed wide shots, those are the things that made a Dario Argento film a Dario Argento film. And, sadly, it’s inventiveness that Phantom lacks almost completely. There isn’t really anything in this film that you couldn’t see someone else doing in another film around the same time.
In a bizzare example of art imitating life imitating art, Phantom seems to be an attempt by Argento to make something “respectable,” just as the character Marco is attempting to do in Opera, based in turn on Argento’s own frustrated attempt to direct a production of Verdi’s Macbeth. The Phantom of the Opera is Argento struggling against his own instincts to make a conventional film using well-regarded source material and, if you’re still wondering how that worked out, it includes a copper rat-killing go-kart complete with cherub hood ornament.
This is a release for those who are either Argento completests or, like me, morbidly curious about this infrequently-released entry in Argento’s filmography. Its bonus features include interviews with Phantom’s producer Giuseppe Colombo and set designer Antonello Geleng, along with an interview with Argento himself. I plan to watch all three. I need to know how Dario Argento’s The Phantom of the Opera came into being.