I think this was the last of the major Dario Argento films I hadn’t yet seen from his golden period (i.e. those first two decades); indeed, I think this is also generally considered his last great film, and judging by what I’ve seen of his later work that’s probably a fair assumption. He said regarding his 2004 film The Card Player that with that film he’d made a deliberate attempt to update his visual style, having apparently forgotten that his 70s/80s visual style was his strongest selling point… and Opera is nothing if not all about visual style. It is a definite case of style over substance (not quite style-as-substance in the way Suspiria is), but it’s a hell of a style nonetheless. Plotwise, it’s kind of a riff on The Phantom of the Opera by way of Argento’s own experience directing an opera, by which I mean he got asked to direct a production of Rigoletto but his vision for it was considered a bit too whacked out by the theatre so he never actually got to do it; the man running the show here is a horror movie director staging a decidedly avant-garde version of Macbeth, and it is sorely beset by things going wrong much like the production of the film seems to have been. Like I said, Argento’s style was his real strength rather than his rigorously logical plotting (and is Verdi’s opera actually considered “cursed” like the play, or was Argento confusing them or just taking a liberty?); the visuals here do most of the heavy lifting—people talking about the “POV” filming of In a Violent Nature need to watch this and learn how that actually works—and at its best Opera is quite a wonder to be hold (the scene of Daria Nicolodi’s character getting shot is particularly amazing). The film’s major problem, perhaps ironically, is the music, not the operatic stuff but the incidental score… however fashionable that sort of hard rock thing might’ve been in 1987, it’s aged poorly and didn’t fit then either. But on the whole this was a pretty good time for a Friday night, and it was high time I finally watched it apart from anything else.
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