Movie timeline woes
9 October 2020 02:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeAll right, I finally got round to watching the 2004 "Phantom of the Opera" movie, and...ouch. Not the sung performances as such (I can't actually tell the difference unless I hear individual numbers contrasted directly against stage-trained voices, and it's certainly better than anything I can produce, despite years of expensive practice -- Emmy Rossum sounded a bit thin on a couple of occasions, but mainly she had a sweet ethereal delivery, with unexpected power and oomph in the low parts of "Point of No Return", and Patrick Wilson has a beautiful control on the quiet, tender notes of Raoul's part). In fact, for the first time I realised how Christine ends up in that unsuitable low-cut blue dress for her journey to her father's grave; having slipped out in her nightgown and shawl, she has to purloin an outfit hastily from what appears to be the opera's costume department. I never noticed that before (it's a second or so of blink-and-you'll miss it footage).
I was also struck by the way that Raoul is basically on the defensive for the entirety of the ensuing sword-fight; he is not attacking the Phantom, he is trying to pull Christine away when the Phantom attacks him, and he spends most of the following moments being driven back/knocked down/having his blade trapped/watching his opponent warily. It's basically a classic Hollywood fight where the hero spends the whole fight losing (because otherwise he would just look too smarmy and self-confident, I suppose), only to suddenly overcome his enemy in a total role-reversal at the end ;-p
And to be honest, the only moments in the film where I did actually find myself strung up and tense as to the outcome were the ones at the end where Raoul is trapped underwater (that sort of scene always makes me try to hold my breath while the protagonist is unable to breathe!) and when the Phantom is trying to choke him with the rope. I don't think that was simply because they were Raoul-in-peril scenes (I'm not that partisan... am I?)
I really didn't understand the business preceding the Phantom's first appearance, where Raoul goes off (although not, in this version, to retrieve the hat which he has presumably left in the cloakroom!), and all the lights immediately go out. Not just in Christine's dressing-room, but on stage and, so far as we are shown, everywhere else in the building, which is presumably now deserted -- we see the two managers departing across an empty pavement outside, whom I took to be the last to leave. Otherwise everyone else left in the Opera (which is now inhabited full-time, thanks to the ballet dormitories!) would presumably be just as alarmed and scared as Christine ;-p
Except... not only does Raoul turn up again to shout through the locked door (having presumably navigated the pitch-black corridors by memory), but Meg Giry later turns the key and wanders in to the darkened room, to be followed even later by her mother. So there are clearly a whole lot of people still running around when the Phantom decides to plunge the building into darkness for dramatic effect :-P
And the timeline changes... well, I remembered the business about the chandelier falling at the end and not midway (despite the fact that we still get the musical effect in the score at the relevant point!), and about the Phantom having been hidden under the Opera all his life and apparently in love with Christine since she was a young child. (Which makes no sense in the context of his claim that his interest in her dawned "the moment I first heard you sing", unless she was an extraordinarily talented seven-year-old!)
But I didn't remember that in this version Christine has supposedly not seen Raoul since before her father died... when she was seven. So while in the stage version they met for the first time when they were fourteen (which in my mind was sufficiently long before Hertha's family came to Paris for Raoul to brush it off naturally as a childhood thing belonging to a different part of his life -- after all, adolescents who are making their first steps into society don't usually swap stories of their childhoods), in this version they only ever knew each other as small children. Which, again, really isn't consistent with the dressing-room reunion scene, even with the entire red scarf/age fourteen allusion carefully omitted. (I'm now surprised the red scarf managed to become so iconic in a fandom where so many teenage fans arrived via the movie -- I didn't realise they'd cut any mention of it altogether!)
How many seven-year-olds sit around reading fluently to one another? And how many seven-year-olds regard their father in the light of a friend and companion? Basically, they tried to change the backstory without considering compatibility with the existing lyrics -- at least they thought things through enough to change the line about celebrating the "new chandelier" at the party ;-p
But unfortunately they did, for no obvious reason at all, also change the lyrics at that point to state that only three months have passed instead of six. Which -- whoops -- really is not compatible with my pregnancy timeline, or the image of the Phantom popping up to hiss ominously in Hertha's ear while Raoul is flailing around in the mirror-maze. I need her to be ungainly and obviously vulnerable -- in a first pregnancy in the nineteenth century, I don't know if she could even be certain she had conceived until she could feel the child move [circa 15-20 weeks].
I was hoping to be able to find a list of plot differences between the stage and screen versions online, but oddly enough I haven't been able to locate so much as a blogpost; the nearest I found was a discussion of the changing dates during which various incarnations of the show have been set (1860s onwards). So I'm entirely limited to what I happened to notice and subsequently remember when watching it.
[Edit: the poto.fandom.com wiki has separate summaries for the 2004 film and ALW stage musical versions, although it's a question of 'spot your own differences' (and probably not comprehensive)]
At the moment, I think I'm tempted to throw up my hands and abandon the idea of doing a movie-fic, which I was never all that keen on in the first place. (I now understand a bit better why people simply can't be bothered to stick to strict canon!) I probably could work around the issues, but I hadn't realised that some of my basic assumptions were so heavily based on what I thought I knew about the staged version... It's just a pity I had some very specific ideas hinged on details from what I did remember of the movie version. They're ultimately rather more negotiable than the other elements, though, and can probably be repurposed.
I just need to double-check the stage version -- at least the only way I can, by reading the lyrics and stage directions in my original Sarah Brightman not-a-full-recording-because-it-wouldn't-fit-on-two-LPs set, which does supposedly give the full script even if it has to highlight the bits which were omitted in recording. And some details/lines may well have changed over the last 30 years since that early stage in the show :-(
I was also struck by the way that Raoul is basically on the defensive for the entirety of the ensuing sword-fight; he is not attacking the Phantom, he is trying to pull Christine away when the Phantom attacks him, and he spends most of the following moments being driven back/knocked down/having his blade trapped/watching his opponent warily. It's basically a classic Hollywood fight where the hero spends the whole fight losing (because otherwise he would just look too smarmy and self-confident, I suppose), only to suddenly overcome his enemy in a total role-reversal at the end ;-p
And to be honest, the only moments in the film where I did actually find myself strung up and tense as to the outcome were the ones at the end where Raoul is trapped underwater (that sort of scene always makes me try to hold my breath while the protagonist is unable to breathe!) and when the Phantom is trying to choke him with the rope. I don't think that was simply because they were Raoul-in-peril scenes (I'm not that partisan... am I?)
I really didn't understand the business preceding the Phantom's first appearance, where Raoul goes off (although not, in this version, to retrieve the hat which he has presumably left in the cloakroom!), and all the lights immediately go out. Not just in Christine's dressing-room, but on stage and, so far as we are shown, everywhere else in the building, which is presumably now deserted -- we see the two managers departing across an empty pavement outside, whom I took to be the last to leave. Otherwise everyone else left in the Opera (which is now inhabited full-time, thanks to the ballet dormitories!) would presumably be just as alarmed and scared as Christine ;-p
Except... not only does Raoul turn up again to shout through the locked door (having presumably navigated the pitch-black corridors by memory), but Meg Giry later turns the key and wanders in to the darkened room, to be followed even later by her mother. So there are clearly a whole lot of people still running around when the Phantom decides to plunge the building into darkness for dramatic effect :-P
And the timeline changes... well, I remembered the business about the chandelier falling at the end and not midway (despite the fact that we still get the musical effect in the score at the relevant point!), and about the Phantom having been hidden under the Opera all his life and apparently in love with Christine since she was a young child. (Which makes no sense in the context of his claim that his interest in her dawned "the moment I first heard you sing", unless she was an extraordinarily talented seven-year-old!)
But I didn't remember that in this version Christine has supposedly not seen Raoul since before her father died... when she was seven. So while in the stage version they met for the first time when they were fourteen (which in my mind was sufficiently long before Hertha's family came to Paris for Raoul to brush it off naturally as a childhood thing belonging to a different part of his life -- after all, adolescents who are making their first steps into society don't usually swap stories of their childhoods), in this version they only ever knew each other as small children. Which, again, really isn't consistent with the dressing-room reunion scene, even with the entire red scarf/age fourteen allusion carefully omitted. (I'm now surprised the red scarf managed to become so iconic in a fandom where so many teenage fans arrived via the movie -- I didn't realise they'd cut any mention of it altogether!)
How many seven-year-olds sit around reading fluently to one another? And how many seven-year-olds regard their father in the light of a friend and companion? Basically, they tried to change the backstory without considering compatibility with the existing lyrics -- at least they thought things through enough to change the line about celebrating the "new chandelier" at the party ;-p
But unfortunately they did, for no obvious reason at all, also change the lyrics at that point to state that only three months have passed instead of six. Which -- whoops -- really is not compatible with my pregnancy timeline, or the image of the Phantom popping up to hiss ominously in Hertha's ear while Raoul is flailing around in the mirror-maze. I need her to be ungainly and obviously vulnerable -- in a first pregnancy in the nineteenth century, I don't know if she could even be certain she had conceived until she could feel the child move [circa 15-20 weeks].
I was hoping to be able to find a list of plot differences between the stage and screen versions online, but oddly enough I haven't been able to locate so much as a blogpost; the nearest I found was a discussion of the changing dates during which various incarnations of the show have been set (1860s onwards). So I'm entirely limited to what I happened to notice and subsequently remember when watching it.
[Edit: the poto.fandom.com wiki has separate summaries for the 2004 film and ALW stage musical versions, although it's a question of 'spot your own differences' (and probably not comprehensive)]
At the moment, I think I'm tempted to throw up my hands and abandon the idea of doing a movie-fic, which I was never all that keen on in the first place. (I now understand a bit better why people simply can't be bothered to stick to strict canon!) I probably could work around the issues, but I hadn't realised that some of my basic assumptions were so heavily based on what I thought I knew about the staged version... It's just a pity I had some very specific ideas hinged on details from what I did remember of the movie version. They're ultimately rather more negotiable than the other elements, though, and can probably be repurposed.
I just need to double-check the stage version -- at least the only way I can, by reading the lyrics and stage directions in my original Sarah Brightman not-a-full-recording-because-it-wouldn't-fit-on-two-LPs set, which does supposedly give the full script even if it has to highlight the bits which were omitted in recording. And some details/lines may well have changed over the last 30 years since that early stage in the show :-(
no subject
Date: 2020-10-09 08:00 am (UTC)https://www.themusicallyrics.com/p/413-the-phantom-of-the-opera-the-musical-lyrics.html
no subject
Date: 2020-10-09 04:55 pm (UTC)Thanks, but on a quick check it's actually got slightly less detail (stage directions etc.) than the printed libretto in my record insert -- e.g. the libretto specifies (No reply) from the Phantom in between Christine's lines "Have you gorged yourself, at last, in your lust for blood?" and "Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh?", indicating that the character waits for an answer that doesn't come before upping the ante still further...
I remember getting caught out by relying on a dialogue transcript on a Blake's 7 episode once, though I don't remember which one -- only the trauma of the discovery! The lines are spoken exactly as given in the fan transcript, but when I rewatched the video of the episode in question, there was a whole lot of body language that basically put a very different interpretation on them from what I'd thought.
Of course this sort of thing is what happens every time a director puts on a new production of an existing play/opera, which is why it's objectively absurd that POTO fans get so much up in arms at the idea of a 'restaged' production changing things around to reinterpret the characters -- the musical has been in existence long enough now to undergo the sort of creative re-reading that 'classic' works undergo all the time. (How long before someone 'updates' it to a modern-dress or WW2 production? ;-p)
But when the reinterpretation consists of trying to make it more consistent with the Really Bad Idea bits of "Love Never Dies", it does stick in the craw. If you're going to write a sequel that tramples all over beloved characters' motivation (and human gestation periods) the way to fix it is generally not to go back and trample over the successful material in the hopes of evening things out :-(
no subject
Date: 2020-10-09 05:48 pm (UTC)