The costumes have a sumptuousness – not the fantastical lavishness of other versions but more a lush realism. He emphasises the historical realism of the period, unlike any other version.
Asia Argento as Christine DaaeĪrgento plays up the horror aspect with severed torsos and graphic scenes of The Phantom mentally forcing a rat catcher to impale his hand inside one of his own traps where it is then gnawed at by rats, not to mention The Phantom’s biting out tongues and ripping off victim’s cheeks.Īrgento certainly mounts a beautiful production. They make a noble attempt to wring new themes from an old story, although the dialogue occasionally comes out as pretentious: “I was abandoned at birth on the river of time and space,” The Phantom tells Christine in a romantic moment. The Lloyd Webber version has served to stuff and mount the story as a sweeping musical romance and its origins as a Gothic potboiler and a horror film were played down, if not entirely forgotten.ĭario Argento adapts the story with the help of Roman Polanski’s regular co-writing partner Gerard Brach. One welcomes Dario Argento’s placing his hands on the story as the last few years have seen the The Phantom of the Opera story turned into something far too respectable, thanks to the Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical, where the story is one now touted by the same people that hold West Side Story (1961) and My Fair Lady (1964) up as classics. (See bottom of the page for Dario Argento’s other genre films).
This version comes from no less than Italian horror director Dario Argento, famed for works like Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980) and Opera/Terror at the Opera (1987). This was the seventh screen/tv adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909).
0 kommentar(er)
