Opera (1987)
Directed by Dario Argento
Written by Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
Starring Christina Marsillach, Urbano Barberini, Daria Nicolodi
Release Date December 19th, 1987
Published February 6th, 2024
The most captivating moment of the new Shudder documentary on director Dario Argento comes during an interview with his former leading lady, Christina Marsillach. Marsillach starred in 1987's Opera for Argento and the two had a deeply fraught relationship. In her interview in Panico Marsillach starts out talking about Argento as a father figure before taking her reminiscence in a decidedly different direction. Slowly she begins to talk about Argento's passive aggressive style in which he would not give her direct instructions but would have other members of the crew speak to her.
Marsillach goes from painting a picture of a shy fatherly figure to portraying Argento like one of the villains of his movies, a tyrannical figure bent on getting his way at all costs. She appears to want to speak kindly of the director but then, in recalling her actual experience on the set of Opera, we get a short term psychodrama, a battle of wills between actress and director that she was not winning. It's captivating, there is no other way to describe it. I believe everything Marsillach is saying, based on what we see of Argento in behind the scenes footage, and yet her account of her work on Opera is oddly dramatic, not unlike an Argento movie, serene on the surface until everything comes to a boil.
Opera unfortunately is a wildly inconsistent piece of work. It's a slasher film set in the world of Opera with all of the pomp and circumstance of that world. The film stars Marsillach as a young diva who gets a shot at the big time after a big star walks out on an Avant-Garde take on Verdi's MacBeth. It's portrayed as a temper tantrum but it become quite serious when the Opera diva is struck by a car and is most assuredly not returning to the stage. Thus, a call is made to Betty (Marsillach), the diva understudy who now must step up and become a star.
