The Phantom of the Opera (1998)

 

Rewatched Monday 10th March 2025

 

Director: Dario Argento

Screenplay: Dario Argento, Gérard Brach (and Giorgina Caspari)

Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux

Cast: Julian Sands as The Phantom of the Opera, Asia Argento as Christine Daaé, Andrea Di Stefano as Raoul, Baron de Chagny, Nadia Rinaldi as Carlotta Altieri, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni as Honorine, István Bubik as The Rat Catcher, Lucia Guzzardi as Madame Giry

 

Somehow because of Gaston Leroux, I can connect Lon Chaney Sr., Claude Rains, Dario Argento...and Andrew Lloyd Webber together among the many who've adapted or starred as the titular Phantom, Leroux's 1910 work first creating this figure terrorising the Paris. This is in mind I forgot Julian Sands was in this now taking up the role, emphasising alongside being a very idiosyncratic casting choice for Argento that this entire project was more idiosyncratic than I remembered. With the prologue suggesting Batman Returns (1992) in the origin of the Phantom as a baby Sands being floated across the waters of a cave in wicker basket, only with rats replacing the penguins, Argento's take with co-writer Gérard Brach taking its own direction with the source material. More so as I thought that Batman Return reference as a joke to myself as I re-watched the opening, only to forget a rat drags the wicker basket to safety and an animatronic rat puppet head in close-up is depicted as their friendship as human to rodent is shown.

Considering his 1987 film Opera, it makes sense for Argento to tackle this setting again, especially as he was always apparently adamant to Leroux's novel at some point. With the Budapest Opera House in Hungary used for the shooting location, designed as a copy of the Paris Opera House central to Leroux's story, alongside scouting real caves in Italy for the underbelly the Phantom looms in, this feels like a passion project and a really ambitious film even for Argento in terms of production. I'd argue the production value is great as a result, a period horror romance tragedy which is one of the few times in his career he went back in time. This also stands out considering this was made at the same time there was sadly the declining end of the Italian genre industry. Argento, even if also filming in Hungary, clearly had some influence least enough for the production values here to depict everything from the back stage areas full of props (even a huge life-size ship stage in one shot) to the washrooms for the linen to the caves below the Paris Opera.

It focuses on the Phantom fully as a romantic anti-hero, one who brutally kills people but has his own moral code, including one most would understand in dealing with an older male creeper of young girls obsessed beyond wanting to force chocolate on them. He is not physically disfigured, which is a significant change, arguably progressive in its own way, as the scarring is psychologically for good reason in being forced to like with rats. Sands is also really appropriate for a figure that compels Asia Argento's lead Christine Daaé, an aspiring opera singer, with the chemistry that would be found between them. As the film goes, the story finds itself deviating into differences such as explicit psychic powers that force a rat catcher to put his hand into a trap of his own set up, or the sense of humour which is that and deliberate.

A gorier and more sexually explicit take is found, feeling like Argento's full blown Gothic period horror which fully embraces its dramatic weight and doesn't suffer the many issues, particularly budget, that afflicted Dracula 3D (2012). The tonal changes and production style actually move this film in Argento's career closest to a wave of films from the nineties, such as those by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro like Delicatessen (1991), of tonally shifting genre films which embraced their practical production values and weren't above very strange moments of humour. This will put some off, but Argento's cinema was already getting weirder by the eighties, where Saxon randomly blares out in the middle of Opera with their heavy metal riffs, and probably the "weirdest" of his films, Phenomenon (1985), involving Jennifer Connelly being able to psychically communicate with insects and a chimpanzee with a razor blade.

It befits that era of baroque genre films with arguably its more lurid and tonal shifting moments helping the film from becoming too dry, be it the strange early CGI effects like Julian Sands seeing a mouse trap in the full of nude men writhing in pain superimposed in the full moon, or the bombast in style even for humour like a close-up of a singer's tonsils out of artistic creativity. Some of this does feel ridiculous but more often than not it feels like for deliberate humour - like a stint in an all-welcome sex bath house with, the potential second love interest for Christine, where equal opportunity nudity of all ages and sizes is contrasted by clothed men arguing philosophy violently in the pool.

There's the potential discomfort with this film's throw-in-the-kitchen-sink tone, if you connect the dots, with the more sexually frank moments knowing Asia Argento is Dario's daughter, though she has worked with him over the later decades to a film like Dark Glasses (2022), so thankfully theirs has felt more a happier familial relationship. Even if films like The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) before had a really deliberately uncomfortable thriller dealing with sexual violence, there's a feeling of greater trust between them which thankfully makes the pair comfortable in collaborating as they have as family in such films. Also she fits here as Christine - dubbed with another's singer voice, she does to Asia Argento's credit fit the role as a period horror lead who is meant to present the pure hearted singer an outcast like Sands would fall for. Including her conflict, when she starts to question if he is trying to dominate her as much as the reality that theirs is to be as much a tragic love, she thankfully feels like an appropriate casting choice. I like Julian Sands too, someone who befits this more glamorous version of the Phantom as much as someone who would also bite a person's tongue out for trying to steal his underground treasure.

In general, the film is over-the-top in a way that might put purists of the source off. It's not enough to have the famous scene of the huge chandelier being dropped mid-performance as a warning, but shirtless Sands sledge hammering its stone support to justify his warnings, and for it to bloodily maim a baker's dozen of the theatre patrons below. The completely abrupt tangent of a rat killing proto-golf kart would not be included in other adaptations, nor so much other Argento productions, but I can't help but think it feels broad on purpose, becoming a flex in Argento's career which you rarely see and with hindsight is appreciated for the heightened delirium of this particular film. The closest thing to this in Italian genre cinema I've seen in general was the directorial work of former actor Michele Soavi from this era, his tragically short filmography for this period even when it was more explicitly serious horror like The Sect (1991) deliberately cutting to a rabbit being able to operate a television remote for a humour jolt.

The curious mix of romance, horror, style and silliness of The Phantom of the Opera feels like the culmination of Argento's more absurd touches, and one thing that has made me be won over by the film is knowledge that this is still at the time before his most divisive, lower budget films came to be. Everything after The Card Player (2004) up to Dark Glasses are his most maligned works and projects where he was having to work with lower budgets. Here, there is the budget, and its sincerity in shifting between romantic tragedy to gore to absurd comedic shifts is feels less like many compromises have come to play, but are the point. As a result, I feel the film's been unfairly maligned in Dario Argento's career and have come to appreciate it.