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rfmcdonaldI wouldn't have gone to see The Phantom of the Opera if my date hadn't insisted. I still haven't seen the musical, I haven't listened to the soundtrack, and I've never read the original book written by Gaston Leroux, so I went with an open mind.
As fun as the date was, I'm afraid that I have to agree with the received opinion about the movie. Yes, Emmy Rossum gave a convincing portrayal of Christine Daaé, dewy-eyed and full-breasted teenage wünderkind haunted by the music always echoing in her mind, yes, Minnie Driver gave an entertaining performance as the egotistical star La Carlotta, and yes, the film certainly looked good. There were fundamental flaws in the narrative--why isn't Christine's character developed more and earlier? why does she accept the Phantom so readily as the Angel of Music? why did I find it difficult to care about the characters?--and I'm afraid that the soundtrack sounded fairly dated and bad-80ish to my ears. ("Faces" was a catchy song, I admit.) Perhaps I should read the late great Susan Sontag's essay on camp?
I found the device used by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher to frame the central narrative interesting. At the film's beginning and at its end, and at intervals throughout the film, the auction scene and its aftermath are portrayed in a staticky black-and-white, featuring an aged and decrepit Vicomte de Chagny, dated in the grey year of 1919, with dirt and mutilated veterans of the Great War in the background. The main thread of the plot--Christine Daaé caught as a young girl of 16 at the beginning of her successes at the Opéra Populaire, caught between the love of the handsome young Vicomte Raoul de Changy and that of the obsessive and murderous genius the Phantom--takes place in the bright and lively Paris of 1870.
Presumably, we see Paris as it was in 1870 before the Franco-Prussian War that started in July and the catastrophic defeats which caused the five-month-long siege of Paris for five months, which allowed the confusedly socialist Paris Commune while the starving poor of barricaded Paris consumed (among other things) the animals of the Paris Zoo, leading to the deaths of twenty thousand people when the Third Republic forced its way into the desperate city in May of 1871.
For Paris, 1870 cleaves neatly into two halves. The second half of the year begins with the ridiculous fuss stirred up by Napoléon III at his wife's behest about the accession of a Catholic Hohenzollern tio the unstable Spanish throne (a Hohenzollern, incidentally, as closely related to the restored Bonaparte dynasty as to the Protestant Hohenzollerns who ruled the Kingdom of Prussia), and quickly segues into a mixture of farce and tragedy. The first half of the year, now, is the climax of Émile Ollivier and his parliamentary liberalism, and the 17th year of the moderately successful rule of Napoléon III and his Second Empire.
Napoleon's nephew may have followed a disastrous foreign policy, launching the costly and non-viable effort to install a Catholic Hapsburg on the throne of a republican and anti-clerical Mexico in the first half of the 1860s, then allowing the Prussian kingdom to overpower the other German states as Bismarck created a centralized and Prussian-dominated German empire in the second half of that decade. These two most critical faults aside, the Second Empire was actually fairly good for France. Had it not been for the catastrophic interruption of war, the Second Empire might actually have become the permanent French regime. Certainly, the 1860s was a decade that saw the French economy flourish thanks to Napoléon III's enlightened policies, with the rapid development of the French coal and steel industry, the foundation of enduring banks like the Société Générale and Crédit Lyonnais and the creation of a profitable stock market, and the emergence of a true consumer society in major urban centres as the French middle class took form.
The Opéra Populaire was product of this capitalist boom. Consider that, at the beginning of the film, this institution was bought by two dealers in scrap metal, examples of the Second Empire's class of newly wealthy capitalists, if backed by the aristocratic wealth of the de Chagny line. Consider that the "opéra" of this centre seems to be not so much traditional opera as the musical, a related musical form which (as Wikipedia notes) differed from the opera in that the musical used various forms of popular music and unaccompanied dialogue, and continues to differ inasmuch as it has a much wider audience than an old-style opera that is now largely seen as an archaic cultural form in the early 21st century. Consider that Christine Daaé comes from the ranks of the poor to dislodge the old-style La Carlotta with her pure and unaffected singing voice. The very narrative of The Phantom of the Opera celebrates the commercialization of culture, its (re)production for a mass audience.
The Phantom contests this model of cultural consumption, of course, creating music not out of a desire for profit but out of his pure love for Christine. It's telling, though, that the only major plot changes from the musical version weaken his position, by portraying Raoul as a relatively developed hero rather than as a simple iconic love and by giving an actual character to the stagehand murdered by the Phantom. It isn't as if the Phantom, between his obsessive romantic love and his inclinations towards murder, had much of a hand to start with.
It might not be a coincidence that Andrew Lloyd Webber created The Phantom of the Opera in the 1980s, in the middle of yet another capitalist economic boom.
As fun as the date was, I'm afraid that I have to agree with the received opinion about the movie. Yes, Emmy Rossum gave a convincing portrayal of Christine Daaé, dewy-eyed and full-breasted teenage wünderkind haunted by the music always echoing in her mind, yes, Minnie Driver gave an entertaining performance as the egotistical star La Carlotta, and yes, the film certainly looked good. There were fundamental flaws in the narrative--why isn't Christine's character developed more and earlier? why does she accept the Phantom so readily as the Angel of Music? why did I find it difficult to care about the characters?--and I'm afraid that the soundtrack sounded fairly dated and bad-80ish to my ears. ("Faces" was a catchy song, I admit.) Perhaps I should read the late great Susan Sontag's essay on camp?
I found the device used by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher to frame the central narrative interesting. At the film's beginning and at its end, and at intervals throughout the film, the auction scene and its aftermath are portrayed in a staticky black-and-white, featuring an aged and decrepit Vicomte de Chagny, dated in the grey year of 1919, with dirt and mutilated veterans of the Great War in the background. The main thread of the plot--Christine Daaé caught as a young girl of 16 at the beginning of her successes at the Opéra Populaire, caught between the love of the handsome young Vicomte Raoul de Changy and that of the obsessive and murderous genius the Phantom--takes place in the bright and lively Paris of 1870.
Presumably, we see Paris as it was in 1870 before the Franco-Prussian War that started in July and the catastrophic defeats which caused the five-month-long siege of Paris for five months, which allowed the confusedly socialist Paris Commune while the starving poor of barricaded Paris consumed (among other things) the animals of the Paris Zoo, leading to the deaths of twenty thousand people when the Third Republic forced its way into the desperate city in May of 1871.
For Paris, 1870 cleaves neatly into two halves. The second half of the year begins with the ridiculous fuss stirred up by Napoléon III at his wife's behest about the accession of a Catholic Hohenzollern tio the unstable Spanish throne (a Hohenzollern, incidentally, as closely related to the restored Bonaparte dynasty as to the Protestant Hohenzollerns who ruled the Kingdom of Prussia), and quickly segues into a mixture of farce and tragedy. The first half of the year, now, is the climax of Émile Ollivier and his parliamentary liberalism, and the 17th year of the moderately successful rule of Napoléon III and his Second Empire.
Napoleon's nephew may have followed a disastrous foreign policy, launching the costly and non-viable effort to install a Catholic Hapsburg on the throne of a republican and anti-clerical Mexico in the first half of the 1860s, then allowing the Prussian kingdom to overpower the other German states as Bismarck created a centralized and Prussian-dominated German empire in the second half of that decade. These two most critical faults aside, the Second Empire was actually fairly good for France. Had it not been for the catastrophic interruption of war, the Second Empire might actually have become the permanent French regime. Certainly, the 1860s was a decade that saw the French economy flourish thanks to Napoléon III's enlightened policies, with the rapid development of the French coal and steel industry, the foundation of enduring banks like the Société Générale and Crédit Lyonnais and the creation of a profitable stock market, and the emergence of a true consumer society in major urban centres as the French middle class took form.
The Opéra Populaire was product of this capitalist boom. Consider that, at the beginning of the film, this institution was bought by two dealers in scrap metal, examples of the Second Empire's class of newly wealthy capitalists, if backed by the aristocratic wealth of the de Chagny line. Consider that the "opéra" of this centre seems to be not so much traditional opera as the musical, a related musical form which (as Wikipedia notes) differed from the opera in that the musical used various forms of popular music and unaccompanied dialogue, and continues to differ inasmuch as it has a much wider audience than an old-style opera that is now largely seen as an archaic cultural form in the early 21st century. Consider that Christine Daaé comes from the ranks of the poor to dislodge the old-style La Carlotta with her pure and unaffected singing voice. The very narrative of The Phantom of the Opera celebrates the commercialization of culture, its (re)production for a mass audience.
The Phantom contests this model of cultural consumption, of course, creating music not out of a desire for profit but out of his pure love for Christine. It's telling, though, that the only major plot changes from the musical version weaken his position, by portraying Raoul as a relatively developed hero rather than as a simple iconic love and by giving an actual character to the stagehand murdered by the Phantom. It isn't as if the Phantom, between his obsessive romantic love and his inclinations towards murder, had much of a hand to start with.
It might not be a coincidence that Andrew Lloyd Webber created The Phantom of the Opera in the 1980s, in the middle of yet another capitalist economic boom.
