GIALLO IDENTIKIT #004 [OPERA aka TERROR AT THE OPERA (1987)]

[Note: This is the eleventh post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

My Giallo Rating: ★★★★★
Subcategory (if any):
     i. Meta-Giallo (aka, Experimental Giallo)
    ii. Foundational Giallo
   iii. Sleaze-Art-Sleaze Giallo
   iv. Giallo/Gothic Hybrid
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd List)


[THE PROBLEM OF ARGENTO; THE PROBLEM OF OPERA]
Writing anything about an Argento film is a little daunting, as they are surely among the most covered (review-wise, dissertation-wise, critical study-wise) of all Gialli. To talk specifically about OPERA adds the further wrinkle that some see it as Argento's last legitimately great (also: fully realized) film, while others dismiss it as an overheated mess, whose "nonsensical" ending is just its most obvious flaw. 

(There's also the additional, meta-level that exists built into the film: Argento shoots a movie about a horror film director who is being criticized for his adaptation of MACBETH at the opera, when he himself attempted to stage Giuseppe Verdi's RIGOLETTO, but was stopped by investors who wouldn’t trust him not to ruin a much-beloved story with his horror-film sensibilities [this is explicitly referenced in dialogue in OPERA]).

While this obvious (and meant) stand-in for Argento—and the various charges leveled against his movies by critics—connects the film in really satisfying ways to the Argento stand-in we get in TENEBRAE, I actually find this the least interesting aspect of the movie. And as I am in the former camp—those who see this as his last great film—I feel more compelled, in this Indentikit entry, to explore, analyze, and defend some of the aspects of this movie that seem the hardest for detractors to digest. 

Because this line of argument is what interests me most about the movie right now (and because, take it or leave it, it remains one of Argento's best-known films), I won't spend a lot of time summarizing the plot.

Three arguments seem to get leveled at the movie most:

[OPERA IS ARGENTO GOING THROUGH HIS GIALLO MOTIONS]
Part of this comes, I think, from how self-referential (and self-quoting) the movie is. We get the telephone booth from TENEBRAE. We get the obsessive presentation of eyes, also from that movie. We get the macrophotography made famous in DEEP RED. We get the phantasmagoric opera house setting first hinted at in FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, and then made a full setpiece in DEEP RED. 

(Maitland McDonagh connects the scene in OPERA, where the killer watches Betty from one of the opera house boxes, to the scene of the plastic-faced killer watching Roberto with binoculars when he accidentally stabs the man who's been tailing him.)

We also get the “parting of curtains-as-dream threshold” from FOUR FLIES, DEEP RED, INFERNO, etc. We get Daria Nicolodi being subjected, again, to a cruel and unusual onscreen death. Etc. etc. etc.

The simple answer to this charge, though, is in the execution of the film. Unlike something like his SLEEPLESS—which *does* feel like Argento recycling his greatest hits (and recycling them for decidedly *lesser* effect than their original versions)—the execution here pushes further, past, beyond the reach of the films that have gone before in his filmography. 

Witness, for instance, the complicated and extended use of the innovative camera rigging to simulate the "raven's eye view". Witness the knife through Stefano's open jaw; the accumulating bands of blood on the needles meant to keep Betty's eyes propped open; the dissecting of the wardrobe mistresses throat in order to retrieve a lost bracelet; the eating of the police inspector's eye; the random, all-pervasive violence (like the cloaked, faceless "muses" being gunned down in the background of the scene, or the glee the killer takes in beating and murdering the crows; I could go on...).
 
Most importantly, perhaps, Argento pushes past the limits of his camera to better represent a kind of phantasmagoria onscreen (this attempt to use his camera to capture, or project, such an altered state usually also corresponds with Argento when he is at his most experimental). See, below, the way that the extreme macro closeups on Betty's eyes lay bare the limits of the film stock's ability to capture it—that the film is literally pushed to the limits of its 35mm resolution. 

When is an eye no longer an eye? After the killer tapes the needles to Betty's eyes (in a position that will prevent her from shutting them), the camera captures her eyes at such an extreme magnification that the sense of them *as eyes* begins to break down.

In this way it reminds me very much of the last images of Ingmar Bergman's PASSION OF ANNA, where Bergman's camera, apparently from a great distance, zooms inexorably onto the pacing figure of Max von Sydow's character, revealing not *more* detail—not more visual information—but less. The camera's ability to capture the details of something so far away is pushed past failure—pushed past its mechanical limits (which are also the lens through which we are viewing the movie). What we watch becomes both a collapse of the technology that underpins the art form we're experiencing (cinema) and a commentary on the emotional/psychic state of Max von Sydow's character.

The breathtaking final images of PASSION OF ANNA. Do you think Max von Sydow had any idea, in these moments, that he would one day star in Argento's SLEEPLESS?

In OPERA, the point of the closeups isn’t to merely show us obsessively photographed eyes (as some sort of comment on voyeurism, the desire to view violence, etc.)—we are meant to see past the fidelity of what the camera can capture, as these eyes dissolve into broken bands of color, visual information that’s being separated out and made to lose its fidelity. Like a fractally detailed “less than,” his closeups reveal that what we take as whole objects (the physical reality of body parts) are in fact a lie from our brain. Are, instead, simply evidence of the limits of what our sense organs can show us. If we could continue to zoom in with our eyes, we would see past the supposed fidelity of the body and realize it is made up of dissolving and smaller parts that, eventually, we lack the context to be able to define or recognize. That we can no longer apprehend as whole, sensible *things*.

(It's no coincidence that later, the extremely macro'd eyes show Betty giving herself drops, huge dollops of distorting liquid that further futzes with the fidelity, the edges, the coherence of her eyes-as-eyes. This is Argento experimenting, pushing, at a high level … His stubborn refusal to return to these kinds of stylistic experiments is all the more frustrating, then, when watching his later films, films he seems intent on making as ugly and cheap looking as possible. As flat and unambiguous and uninspired as possible.)

His macrophotography of Betty's eyes also reminds me of the way the camera zooms in on Nancy Allen in the elevator murder in DRESSED TO KILL. The zoom goes so far that it begins to break down the film's grain.

And then there are the phantasmagorical elements that make no literal sense, whose inclusion in the movie Argento never even tries to explain. Moments when he gives a kind of disembodied agency to certain images in the movie. (Critic  David Sanjek puts it this way, regarding Argento's use of his camera: "At times, Argento employs the camera's point of view as a means of audience identification with the actions of a character, most often the killer. Just as often, however, the camera appears to possess a consciousness of its own—as during a bravura two-and-a-half minute tracking shot in Sotto gli occhi dell assassino (Tenebrae aka Unsane [1982]) ... One initially assumes the camera's point of view parallels that of the killer, until the point of view becomes other-than-human as the camera airily surmounts the walls, roof, and opposite side of the building to then resume its original position.") 

There's something also connected here, in his obsessive use of screens in the movie—like the TV screen whose image, showing Betty performing, is zoomed in on and then scratched by the killer with his knife. In a futile attempt, it seems, to get at *the thing* that exists behind the image. 

Argento, through audacious, unapologetic style, takes us behind this screen when it comes to the killer's mind. He starts by showing us his throbbing, pulsing brain. 

The brain thrums. Spasms. As it processes (we can assume) both his memories of past murders and his plans for new ones. But Argento doesn't stop with this impossibly interior shot of the killer's anatomy. Instead, he continues into a world where the killer's throbbing brainwave overwrites the "objective" reality of the other characters. Manifesting into the physical world like a kind of (I don't know what else to call it but) pseudo-telekinesis.

When he stalks Betty in the prelude to the wardrobe mistress’ murder, Betty’s body appears to be hit by the concussive force of the killer’s pulse. He appears to be able to mentally project what is going on in his mind so that the rest of the "screen," the frame, contracts and expands in sync with his pulse. There isn’t even the beginning of an explanation for this. How can we reasonably believe that the movement of the killer's brain inside his skull can alter the reality of the world around him? What other Argento film (other than those set in fairy-tale, supernatural-horror worlds) would even attempt such a compromising of the film's reality?
 
And while it’s certainly true that a film like DEEP RED marked the moment in Argento’s Gialli where he was willing to allow for the existence of the supernatural in his detective plots, it is also true that the film spends a good deal of time offering context and “explanation” for this presence of the supernatural (under the guise of the professor lecturing at the parapsychology conference). In OPERA, the pseudo-supernatural powers that the killer seems to possess—at least in intense periods of excitement—are granted no such context. Instead, it is Argento daring to stretch the subjectivity of his lens both to, and past, its breaking point.

(Another example of this unexplained “disembodied-ness” in the picture comes after Betty has the dream that allows her to remember seeing her mother, and the killer, when she was a child. When she wakes up, we suddenly get her internal monologue, as she tries to make sense of the dream she’s just had. This kind of internal monologue shows up nowhere else in the movie, and is deployed here matter-of-factly, without any kind of warning or cue. Its resulting effect is really something.)

[THINNESS OF STORY & CHARACTERIZATION]
Tbh, this is an argument I just don't buy. I wouldn't call it thin; instead, I'd argue that it's startlingly economical, and works in the same way that the clipped, (even truncated) encounters between TENEBRAE's characters work. Think the "Borsalino hat" exchange between Peter Neal and his lit agent Bulmer. Think Christian Borromeo growling playfully at Lara Wendel, which of course foreshadows the otherwise out-of-nowhere dog attack that forces Wendel into the killer's home. Think the airport phone conversation between Jane and Peter, brief but telling, both telegraphing for us the manic-depressive attachment that Jane has for Peter, but also the dismissive, disingenuous small-talk our "hero" Peter is willing to engage in, just to blow off the supposed love of his life. 

In OPERA, it’s probably best applied to the scenes with Argento’s stand-in (played by Ian Charleson). After Betty’s debut in the play, Charleson has returned to his apartment with the reviews of the show. They are full of insults and criticisms aimed at his direction, while also lavishing praise on Betty’s performance. Charleson’s fashion model girlfriend says: 

“They're pulling you to pieces … And she [Betty], a total unknown, gets nothing but praise.” 

Marc: “Well, she was very good.”

“Last time, when they lauded Cecilia Gasti and blasted your direction of Rigoletto, you were very pissed off, but not this time. How come? … You want to take the girl to bed, don't you?”

Instead of answering, Marc only smiles, and continues to pretend to read the newspaper reviews. She attempts to remind him of how devoted she is to him and their relationship.

“Listen. To be here with you this evening, I took two flights and turned down a fashion show.”

 His response? He doesn’t answer, but instead kind of rolls his eyes and smiles, an expression that seems to say something along the lines of “sucks to be you”.

Later, after the cast of the opera have learned of the first murder, she and Charleson are leaving the opera house. Argento gives us this brief but effective exchange:

“All this turns you on, doesn't it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You're a sadist.”

“Oh, really?”

“Everyone I know who knows you says the same thing.”

“That must be very boring for you.”  

On the one hand, I can see how people would read these scenes as examples of under-developed genre writing, characters that exist as nothing more than thumbnails, a clear indication of the script’s limitations. But tbh, I really feel their accumulation, their sometimes clipped rhythm, does exactly what’s needed, in the least amount of runtime as possible. Even in his limited screen time—in these limited exchanges—Charleson’s character is as clear and fleshed-out as any other in the film. And satisfyingly so, I’d argue.

[THE WTF, HEAD-SCRATCHING ENDING]
This is explicable in a couple of ways, I think. For one, it's a self-referential sliver that relocates key characteristics of Jennifer Connelly's character from PHENOMENA in Cristina Marsillach's Betty here. Both share a dreamy, fairy tale mountain surrounding. Both show a non-natural (not naturally explainable) connection to small creatures in nature. And both, at the end of their characters, find solace in nature only because of a severe, even pathological isolation. 

(Argento breaks the fourth wall between these movies even more, via his stand-in: He shows the director Marc doing insect screen tests [with the fly invisibly attached to the end of a wire that is then threaded in front of the camera] that no doubt were actually used for some of the shots in PHENOMENA.)

This superimposing of Connelly's character on Marsillach's isn't really an explanation, though, as much as it is a creative and thematic resonance that Argento chose to include for whatever personal or creative reasons. What is much simpler, in terms of explanation, (for those who find the ending to be so wtf), is that Betty has simply gone mad as a result of the physical, mental, emotional abuse that she's suffered because of her mother. 

In this final encounter with the killer, she is forced to identify with her abusive mother (and the sexual violence she forced on her) in order to calm the killer long enough for the police to arrest him. Just as quickly, she sheds this (self) identification, calling it "nonsense" when she's quizzed by the detectives. And Betty doesn't leave with them, but retreats to the ground. To a world of nature that exists outside of good and evil, law and order, or any sort of framework of humankind. She suddenly identifies with the natural world's beauty, a beauty she hopes to (literally) bury herself in. (The fact that the camera buries itself in the ground, until everything goes black, gets, I think, at this kind of delirious oblivion that she is now seeking.)

Certainly the suddenness of (and sheer number of) reversals contained in this epilogue is a little head-spinning. In a matter of moments we get an almost unprocessable "download" of plot details. Betty and Marc have clearly become a couple since the opera house fire. From the dialogue we learn that they are planning their next theater production. They've moved (if only temporarily) somewhere in the Swiss Alps. Betty is no longer sexually frigid. We get a television program that conveniently recaps the opera house fire that supposedly killed the film's villain, only to find out, in a matter of seconds, that the body in the opera fire wasn't the killer's at all, but a dummy's. There is a nameless maid who appears onscreen for mere seconds, and then becomes the corpse-evidence that the killer has tracked Betty and Marc to this faraway place. And suddenly Marc is yelling out a window at Betty, to tell her that the murderer is here on the mountain and that she must run!

This parade of rapid-fire reveals—coupled with the "all I love is nature" ending—I can see how, on a first viewing esp., it would all add up to mush. But how is it any different than the irrational, rapid-fire reveals at the end of TENEBRAE? The only difference is that Betty chooses to express her insanity (her inability to process what has happened to her—is *still* happening to her) through a childish regression into a fairy-tale world of nature. Through a childish identification with strange small animals and the inherent goodness of grass.

As opposed to Daria Nicolodi's reaction at the end of TENEBRAE. Her world, like Betty's, has been dismantled in a matter of minutes. Her lover, too, has just been killed in front of her eyes. And her "retreat" is to scream, and scream, and scream. (The more I watch the two movies in conjunction with each other, the more I believe that the endings are meant to be read this way, as two sides to the same coin—as equal and opposite reactions to the same world-obliterating "reveal" the two lead actresses are forced to watch.)

...

For all of these reasons, I'd argue that OPERA is both Argento's most fully realized work (stylistically, technically, oneirically) and his most baldly experimental. It is, even more than TENEBRAE, Argento's exploding of the limits and conventions of the Giallo, exploding and deforming and reconstituting them in ways that feel both alien to the Gialli he'd made up till then and like a deep, intuitive understanding of all of them at once. 

Leonard Jacobs

October, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The Japanese Blu-ray (Land of Whimsy review here) | LANGUAGE: English soundtrack | DIRECTOR: Dario Argento | WRITER(S): Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini | MUSIC: Claudio Simonetti, Brian Eno, Roger Eno, Steel Grave, Bill Wyman  | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Ronnie Taylor  | CAST: Cristina Marsillach (Betty); Ian Charleson (Marco); Urbano Barberini (Inspector Alan Santini); Daria Nicolodi (Mira); Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni (Giulia); Antonella Vitale (Marion); William McNamara (Stefano); Barbara Cupisti (Signora Albertini); Antonino Iuorio (Baddini); Carola Stagnaro (Alma's mother); Francesca Cassola (Alma); Maurizio Garrone (Maurizio, the raven trainer); Cristina Giachino (Maria, the assistant director)