Dario Argento
Opera

As a sincere enthusiast of Dario Argento's cinema, I cannot hide the fact that, since the mid-'80s, the Roman director has experienced some missteps that, over time, might have downsized his stature as a filmmaker, almost erasing the wealth of good work he accomplished between the '70s and early '80s, namely from "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" to "Tenebrae." One may disagree on the intrinsic value of Argento's cinema and the director's international stature, but one cannot deny that, in that happy period, he managed to film a handful of movies which, while not deviating from mere entertainment circuits, demonstrated an original and, above all, alternative style compared to foreign cinema. Certainly, Argento came after Bava, Freda, Fulci, but more than anyone, his cinema was popular, creating a mythology around his films and Italian thriller in the public imagination: in this sense, Argento's experience can be compared to that of one of his mentors, Sergio Leone, who in the '60s pointed out nothing less than the Italian path to western cinema, surpassing the American model in creating a new cinematic language. I hope you will forgive the digression, but I believe that clarifying the director's merits helps explain the viewer's disappointment, and especially that of the genre cinema enthusiast, in watching this "Opera" ('87), one of the lowest points in his career.

I will say right away that, in my personal opinion, there is nothing worth saving in this film. The plot is bland, with a sort of fetish for the macabre and gruesome prevailing, where the murders are the true aesthetic and narrative center of the film, and the story ends up being relegated to a mere pretext for their depiction. The point is that it doesn't seem intentional, as was programmatically the case in Inferno ('80), but rather the result of a fundamental carelessness, a lack of ideas and inability to build stories, as it used to happen in the past, even drawing inspiration from mystery literature and particularly from Ellery Queen novels.

The actors seem to be chosen at random, not only for their lack of acting skills (barely saved by the usual Nicolodi), but also, and above all, considering the roles assigned to them in the flimsy narrative plot: without delving into the plot description, I just observe how a central character of the film is entrusted to a young actor, when, according to the subject, he should be played, at the very least, by a fifty-year-old. This alters the very logic of the plot, and the discovery of the usual killer ends up irritating, rather than surprising, the more attentive viewer. The well-known technique of the "double ending" also shows its limitations, which had made "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" and "Deep Red" so appreciated: the first ending would be sufficient to conclude the film, while the final twenty minutes, set in a context completely detached from previous events, feel like an unwanted appendage, a broth to stretch the runtime of a story otherwise destined only for television audiences, but overall inferior to the best episodes of the contemporaneous Don Tonino (mind you, I'm not joking). The soundtrack is based on a trite contrast between opera and heavy metal, already suggested in the previous Phenomena, which not only appears rather predictable but, above all, seems ill-suited to the genre addressed by the director: a simple comparison with the jazz prog atmospheres of the early Argento film scores highlights the '80s metal's poor aptitude to enrich the filmic representation, adding sonic violence to visual violence, perhaps in an excessively hypertrophic manner. These limitations do not seem to me to be counterbalanced by the stylistic effectiveness of some scenes, shot inside the Teatro Regio of Parma, which some critics claim redeem a comfortably mediocre film. This is because for a thriller, or whodunit if you will, a sufficiently credible subject is demanded first and foremost, and only secondarily an aesthetic value.

Therefore, a terrible film. Unless Argento also fell victim to the Macbeth curse, so much talked about in Opera.