The basket bearing an infant, abandoned at birth by his natural mother, drifts along the Seine into underground caverns beneath the Paris Opera House before coming ashore amidst the rats who inhabit them.
30 or so years later a trio of workmen carrying out works beneath the opera house happen upon something which promptly kills them.
Stories of a Phantom haunting the opera house thus begin to circulate.
Not, however, that these concern beautiful young opera singer Christine Daae as she takes to the otherwise empty stage in the otherwise empty auditorium to practice some scales and dream of an audience.
Except there is an audience, in the form of the Phantom. Christine's voice, purity and beauty enchant him and he determined to possess her.
They fleetingly encounter one another in one of the labyrinthine corridors of the opera house, the Phantom an anonymous presence. Something passes between them – a frisson, an attraction.
The Phantom sends thus Christine a bouquet of flowers and a message of love. But – shades more of the romance of Cyrano de Bergerac than the gothic horror normally associated with The Phantom of the Opera , perhaps – she takes her secret admirer to be the Baron Raoul De Chagny.
This is not an unreasonable assumption seeing as he is also besotted with her. But it also gives the Phantom a rival…
Director Dario Argento has long acknowledged the influence of Gaston Leroux's classic tale and its 1943 screen adaptation upon his work, as indeed should be obvious to anyone who has seen – for example – his perverse riffing on the legend in the 1987 giallo Opera .
This 1998 film is less radical in so far as it a recognisable gothic period piece that utilises characters and situations familiar from the original. Yet, nor can it be considered a straight retelling by any means, with Argento and his co-screenwriter Gerard Brach giving the legend their own distinctly (post)modern slant.
Their first major innovation is to present a Phantom, as incarnated by Julian Sands in rock god mode, who is neither physically scarred nor deformed. Instead his wounds are all internal, the consequence of his upbringing by rats – albeit gorily exteriorised through his penchant for ripping out the throats of those who intrude upon his territory for whatever reason.
Their second is to thread a broad theme of comedy through the tragic romance through such secondary characters as Christine's fussing, lesbian-coded maid Honorine and a pair of rat catchers with a penchant for Heath-Robinson style contraptions.
Neither, alas, works terribly well.
Comic relief has been a constituent element of Argento's filmic universe as far back as his debut, the giallo, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and is not impossible within the gothic horror context, as here, if we consider, for instance, James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein or Roman Polanski's Dance of the Vampires (also co-scripted by Brach). Here, however, it feels over-emphasised and insufficiently integrated, as we veer uncomfortably between the groteseque and horrific, the tragic and romantic and broad comedy.
The psychological interpretation given the Phantom, meanwhile, denies the film of what would otherwise be its pivotal, centrepiece scene, the unmasking and of the key idea of a beautiful soul behind an ugly facade.
It's not that we get the opposite, in terms of a physically attractive Phantom whose appearance hides a monster – that at least could have made for comparisons with Terence Fisher's 1962 version, a predominant theme throughout the Hammer auteur's work being to play upon dualities of good and evil, ugliness and beauty – more an unsatisfactory combination of the two whereby the Phantom and the Baron emerge as somewhat indistinguishable.
Both love Christina and both have what we might term issues, the Baron's signified by a drink-and-drugs binge in a decadent bathhouse-cum-brothel, that must features as much naked flesh as the entirety of Argento's preceding 13 films, following his rejection.
Yet, crucially, it's precisely that these are merely issues, neuroses that you feel could be resolved relatively easily. There's insufficient sense of the impossible amour fou that should be there; a sense, ironically, that Argento captured far more successfully within Opera.
The main pleasures to be had, then, are in the visuals and incidentals, with the fact that the Budapest opera house used was itself constructed as an exact copy of the Paris original of Leroux story curiously giving Argento's film a greater claim to authenticity in this regard than previous versions.
Unfortunately this too feels somewhat undone, along with Ronnie Taylor's typically impressive cinematography, by some poor effects work from Sergio Stivaletti. Unless, of course, the intention was to make the viewer aware of different orders and epochs of Baudrillardian simulacra, of the modernism of Budapest's Paris opera house copy juxtaposed against the postmodernism of an imagined, ideal 'rooftops of Paris' set without real world referent.
That such ideas could have been in there is certainly possible: We can note the self-referential artistic presence of Edgar Degas sketching the young ballerinas (and accompanying this, the raising of questions of the sexual exploitation of innocents, with one of the Phantom's more deserved victims a bourgeois who takes a paedophiliac interest in his proteges; a theme that takes on a more personal significance when we remember that once again Dario is shooting his daughter Asia – whose performance as Christine is anther of the film's plusses – half-naked) or the fight that breaks out between two young artists at the bathhouse as to the merits of Charles Baudelaire or lack thereof.
But Argento is an instinctual and intuitive rather than an intellectual and theoretical filmmaker: He does what he feels to be correct. Alas in Phantom of the Opera my feeling is that there is more that is wrong than right.
Nevertheless, even the worst Argento failures has enough fascinating ideas and moments in it to be worth more than many film-maker's successes – at least in this writer's opinion…
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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