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Opera (1987)

Dario Argento

Italy

107 min, color, English

Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev

This is perhaps the most vicious Argento film I have seen to date. It's not that the body count is higher than usual or that the murders are much more gruesome than, oh I don't know, any of his gialli, but having the unseen killer tie up the heroine, tape needles under her eyes so she cannot close them, and then force her to watch things like stabbing her boyfriend repeatedly, or cut up a female friend of hers with scissors in order to get a bracelet she had accidentally swallowed, or... never mind, I am sure you get the idea.

The horror director making an opera I still don't get it

Unlike the standard giallo, but very much in the tradition of the often maligned Phenomena (which I sort of liked somewhat), this film involves non-humans with some decidedly rational behavior. In the other film there were insects and a monkey, this time it is crows. Now, I have a strong aversion to birds ever seeing Hitchcock's film of that name---I have to force myself to walk by a flock of ducks without eyeing them suspiciously and have trouble enjoying myself on the beach with all these seagulls who might strike without warning any second---and, let's face it, crows are not exactly the most attractive of the Corvus genus. Seeing them attack a man here and then watching one of them trying to swallow a loose eyeball is not just nauseating physically, it's traumatic on a more subconscious level. I am afraid my psyche, after being bloodied once by Alfred, has not received the coup de grace from the maestro of the macabre himself.

One rose from the first fan Gratuitous shot of Cristina Marsillach

Putting aside the repelling sight that crows are, I have to admit that Argento picked the bird brilliantly. I am not aware of the supposed vengefulness and long-term memory the film claims these birds to possess (that is, once they get offended by someone, they remember him forever, can pick him from a line up, and will wreak vengeance as bloody as their beaks would allow), and I do not know that birds have a collective security system that puts the U.N. to shame: an attack upon one of them is an attack upon all, activating Article II of the covenant that requires the rest of the flock to seek out and destroy the perpetrator. But I do know that crows sometimes represent the souls of dead people, and as such they function rather well in this film, for there are plenty of people who die in it.

Clockwork Orange for the 1980s Who says Argento only kills women?

To make matters even more unusual than usual, Argento puts Verdi's Macbeth, or rather a production of it, at the heart of the film. This seems a bit autobiographical, and the role of the director Marco (Ian Charleson), who plays a horror movie director who stages an opera in a rather unorthodox manner, echoes Argento himself and what he might do if he had to direct an opera himself. Macbeth itself is legendary for bringing bad luck, not just as an opera but as a play as well. The Curse of Macbeth is an old superstition about the horrible things that happen when the play is performed. There have been injuries, deaths, heart-attacks, violence, burns, falls, and so on ever since the time Shakespeare had it produced for the first time (he had to play the lady when the boy who was supposed to do it suddenly died). Interestingly, a year after this film, during a production of Verdi's opera at the Met, a man leapt off the rail into the orchestra, killing himself on impact. Still, it is never explained why the people wouldn't simply counteract the curse by spinning around three times, saying some curse, and spitting over their left shoulder. It's worked for me. I did it after watching the film, just in case the curse transcended medium yet again.

Ian Charleson and Antonella Vitale Everyone looks suspicious at the opera

In all this menacing atmosphere with crows, the Scottish play (don't say the name, it will bring bad luck too), and opera (argh, shudder), Argento pulls in some trademarked violence. When the titular diva gets run over by a car, her understudy Betty (Cristina Marsillach) gets her first break. She hesitates at first, a combination of stage-fright, lack of confidence in her singing abilities, and a premonition of what might happen if she participates. She is persuaded by her agent Mira (Daria Nicolodi in her last, at least thus far, role for Dario) and the director Marco. She performs beautifully even though a mysterious phone call suggests that her getting the chance was not entirely accidental and even though an usher gets to examine a coat hanger with the inside of his skull.

You are a horror director, give me pointers... Giulia and Betty discover the bracelet

A murder having been committed, the police swings into action in the form of police inspector Alan (Urbano Barberini) who is a bit odd, to say the least. He appears to have some strange fixation on Betty and a penchant for rubbing people the wrong way. This would not be menacing if it weren't for his rather bizarre exchange with Marco. When he solicits Marco's advice on the matter because the latter is a horror specialist, Marco replies that one should not confuse movies with reality. "Depends on what you mean by reality," retorts the inspector, raising our confidence in him right above 2 degrees Kelvin.

Betty is forced to watch yet another murder Believe it or not, this is not the worst that's going to happen to Giulia

But the inspector's unorthodox methods are not what bothered me from the beginning. It is Betty's behavior that was somewhat unsettling as well. After her phenomenally successful debut, she tries to have sex with her boyfriend Urbano (William McNamara) but does not make it. She explains that she is frigid and has never been able to get aroused with a man. In this film, the conclusion is that she has some childhood trauma to account for that, but one might wonder why she wouldn't give it a shot with a girl instead. Anyway, while Urbano is in the kitchen making tea, the killer snatches Betty, ties her up to a column, gags her, tapes the needles under her eyes, and then waits for Urbano to come back. Of course, the first thing the dope does upon seeing his girlfriend tied up is walk straight to her despite her wreathing and obviously trying to tell him not to do it. The killer then stabs Urbano through the throat (there's an excruciating closeup of the blade sticking out inside him mouth), then slashes him repeatedly until the boy expires. The killer then cuts Betty loose and disappears.

What Argento dreams to do to the audience The inspector inspecting some mysterious bruises

It is at this point that Betty's behavior becomes a bit weird. She runs out into the rain, makes an anonymous call to the police to inform them about the murder, stumbles across Marco, confides in him, lets him leave her alone (despite him seeing someone watching her apartment), and never bothers to do anything else. If she was stressed, I would understand. But what about Marco? The guy has obviously fallen for Betty despite having a pretty girlfriend (Antonella Vitale), and he does nothing more? But it's not over. The killer breaks into the opera house and vandalizes Betty's stage dress. It is then that the crows get out of their cage, causing the killer to butcher a few of them, which in turn triggers their long-term memory/revenge receptors. At any rate, when Giulia (Coralina Tassoni) repairs the dress and finds a mysterious gold bracelet attached to it, her time is up. Conveniently, Betty walks in to be tied, gagged, scotched, and forced to watch again. And again, all she does is run away and not tell anyone.

Daria Nicolodi showing Cristina the ropes The infamous bullet through the eye scene

At least this time the inspector runs into her, sees the bruises on her hands, and deduces that something is wrong. He tells her to lock herself in her apartment and promises to send an officer to guard her. Naturally, Betty's first order of business is to use eye drops to dilate her pupils so that she won't be able to see the officer when he arrives. Not just that, but she unlocks the door to allow him to let himself in, which he does. When Mira comes and tells her that she has met the officer downstairs, the two suddenly realize that one of the men is the killer. But which one? This is the occasion of the famous sequence in which Daria Nicolodi gets her hair dynamited. She claims this was Dario's plot to kill her, and that it was only thwarted because the stunt people used half the amount of dynamite they were supposed to. Perhaps. The shot is stunning: she peers through the peep-hole, the killer fires his gun, the bullet travels through the hole, strikes her in her right eye, exits from the back, pushing up her hair, and hits the phone several feet away. Daria then topples backward in slow motion and sprawls on the floor. Pure Argento. The rest of the scene with Betty playing hide and seek and kill with the assailant is just standard fare.

What I would do if I saw the bullet through the eye Betty is now alone with the killer

Without divulging the rest of the film, it will suffice to say that the crows do play their role, and rather gruesomely at that. They fly around in the huge and pompous opera hall, and there are some crow-cam shots from their vantage point as they circle the audience trying to recognize their enemy, and then dive straight for him, viciously strike at him, tearing pieces of flesh and ripping his eye out. It is a most unsettling sequence, and it is beautifully done. When one realizes that they had no animation and had to do everything with animatronics, it becomes even more impressive. The shot of the crow with the eyeball is going to linger with me for a long time to come.

Through the old A/C system Crows at the opera

The finale is something of a let-down. As in a second-rate horror film, the killer comes back. But this is not the worst of it. At this point, we know that Betty's sexual problems do come from a severe childhood trauma: she has seen her sadistic mother make the killer (her lover) murder girls in especially grizzly ways just to deign to have sex with him. The killer has returned for Betty (who looks just like her mother) and is apparently trying to "cure" her frigidity or perhaps trying to free himself of this spell that these women have over him that forces him to do such abominable things. At any rate, the question at this point is whether Betty is like her mother: is she also a monster? The ending is so happy, it will make you cry with disappointment. I hear that some people proposed an alternate ending that suggested that Betty was not all that innocent after all, but Argento vetoed it. Pity. It would have made for a much better finale.

Stomach-churning scene: crow with eyeball Betty in the clutches of the killer

Despite Argento piling some crap on Cristina for being difficult to work with, her performance is excellent. Considering that in the most extreme scenes she only has her eyes to portray emotion with, I have to say that she was unforgettable. Ian Charleson seems underutilized as the love-struck horror director and although he conveys enough concern with the heroine to make us believe that he's fallen for her, in general he seems too... British... in that detached way to make it stick. Daria Nicolodi is, well, Daria Nicolodi. She's great even if she's somewhat full of herself (in the featurette she claimed that this film's distinguishing feature is that it is the last she'll make with Dario). The cinematography is superb although there aren't any of the lush color scenes I very much like. A very good film overall, and a worthy comeback for the director.

The elaborate suicide/murder sequence I am nothing like my mother

The Limited Edition 2-disc set from Anchor Bay is a must. The film is presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio and the picture is anamorphic. It is the uncut 107 minute version too. The colors are deep and there are no compression artifacts that I noticed. Audio choices are between DTS 6.1 and Dolby Digital 5.1 EX, both in English. I always prefer DTS, and this here is no exception. The extras include a half-an-hour featurette with Argento, cinematographer Ronnie Taylor, Nicolodi, Simonetti, and Barberini in which they discuss everything from the curse of Macbeth to special effects and such. There are also talent files, a music video, and an entire CD with the Simonetti score for the film. Definitely the way to go.

December 26, 2005