Like life, but with more bustiers
I’m no expert, but I really get the feeling that Repo! The Genetic Opera fared so poorly because the marketing department plastered “From the producers of Saw” all over everything.
It seems to me that there are people who love the Saw movies and people who love musicals, but the only people who love the Saw movies and musicals are me and the guy who screams obscenities outside of Beard Papa.
“From the producers of Saw” is a fair assessment of Repo!. Like Saw, it’s over-the-top gory in some places and uncomfortably grotesque in others, and melodramatic, and there’s a thread of morality running through it that twitches back and forth between idealism and realism.
But nobody goes to the Saw movies because he thinks they have something interesting to say about the consequences of bad decisions, or the value of human life. (Even though they kind of do.) You go because you’re in the mood to see fictional jagoffs get torn apart inventively.
Likewise, nobody goes to a musical because he loves dark, dystopian underworlds in which every single person is a vain, backstabbing douchemonkey. You want glamour in a musical. You want light, and colour, and romance, even in a tragedy. This is why everybody hates Sweeney Todd, but they all love Moulin Rouge!
(Except for me and Beard Papa Obscenities Guy. Call me, Beard Papa Obscenities Guy! My child-bearing years are almost over!)
But Repo! the Genetic Opera is an entity unto itself, and deserved a fairer shake.
Paul Sorvino is Rotti Largo, a wealthy industrialist who’s saved the world from widespread organ failure with synthetic organs and high-interest financing, and won the legal right to repossess his clients’ organs if they default on their agreement. Stricken down by cancer, Largo has to settle his affairs soonest, but unfortunately, his children are a bunch of dillholes.
Ogre No Last Name is Pavi Largo, creepy, grinning Eurotrash who spends all his time bangin’ hos and getting face transplants.
Bill Mosely is Luigi Largo, a psychopath with high ambition and poor self-control.
Paris Hilton is Amber Sweet (nee Largo,) a spoiled, junkie slutbag who keeps tinkering with her appearance, and deludes herself that she’s got Serious Pipes, when actually she’s got a cocktail straw. (That’s my favourite thing about this movie: Paris Hilton is playing herself, and she must have known that, and she did it anyway.)
The Largos are gods among the common people, because mostly the dead are the sort of people nobody’s going to miss, and because Rotti and his children are celebrities: rich, glamorous and deliciously alien in a world of poverty, decay and endless night.
But there are worse fates, maybe, than dying forgotten in an alley after a masked stranger tears you open and takes back your heart.
Sarah Brightman is Blind Mag, who traded her freedom to GeneCo for bionic eyes long ago, and has been giving command performances and shilling Largo’s wares ever since. She wants to retire, but her contract is no different from anyone else’s, despite her stardom: if she walks away, she walks away blind.
(This stardom is my second-favourite thing. You wondered what it would take to finally see an opera singer enjoy the universal idolatry that usually goes to airbrushed, Auto-Tuned simpletons, and now you know: the apocalypse, basically.)
Anthony Stewart Head is Nathan Wallace, a widower whose house is a shrine to his dead wife. (Or a means of torturing himself over the circumstances of her death; huge, holographic images of her are hung on every wall.)
By day, Nathan hovers and fusses and coddles his daughter to the point of suffocation, agonizing over her failing health. By night, he works for Largo, to whom he’s sold his soul; against everything he is and was and wanted to be, he’s a repo man.
He’s different then, perhaps by necessity; whatever refinements he displays at home, it’s nothing compared to the grinning, snarling monster he becomes when he’s out on the streets with a scalpel in hand.
Is he expressing his true nature? Does he pretend the people he slaughters are nothing but animals? Is he acting like the fiend he believes himself to be?
He’s the most ambiguous character in the film, by far.
Alexa Vega is Shiloh Wallace, a teenager confined to her bedroom (and often to her bed) to preserve her against a deadly blood disease. Isolated and afraid, she spends most of her time reading entertainment rags, watching television and staring out the window, longing for good health, for freedom.
In desperation–and also possibly because he’s kind of mental–Rotti Largo reaches out to Shiloh, in the hopes of luring her into his clutches and passing his empire on to her when he dies. (He was in love with Shiloh’s mother, so she’s sort of family, if you squint.)
Of course she’s reluctant, but the Largos are rich and powerful, and he’s offering her everything–including a cure for the illness that’s kept her confined to one small room for as long as she can remember.
Come to the opera tonight, he says. It’s Blind Mag’s final performance before she sacrifices her sight to leave the stage forever.
He’s not so friendly with Shiloh’s father; he wants Nathan to take Mag’s eyes. He’s never balked at anything Largo’s asked him to do, but he can’t bring himself to carve up the beautiful bird who’s been the only bright spot in so many peoples’ lives for so long… and his wife’s BFF, back in the day.
Each of Repo!’s many narrative threads intertwine gradually and reach a crescendo at the big finale, at which point all secrets are revealed and all conflicts resolved, but it’s a great big bloody mess, some things falling by the wayside that shouldn’t, other things achieving a stature they don’t deserve.
It’s like life, but with more bustiers.
It’s not a perfect film; the music is mostly kind of lousy, and everyone keeps saying Shiloh is the spitting image of her mother when she’s clearly not, and some of the things that go unexplained really ought not to have done so. (What is it that gives corpse fluids their narcotic effect, and how does one even extract said fluids from a mummy?)
But I wept like Jesus in some scenes, and it’s a treat for the eyes, and cynical and hopeful at the same time, and for a lady who swings around on wires in silly costumes, performing arias for moneyed idiots and projecting holograms with her eyes, Blind Mag is kind of badass.
Repo! If you’re like me and Beard Papa Obscenities Guy, you’ll enunciate that exclamation point when you say it. You’ll enunciate it so hard.
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Okay, this I think I would enjoy. Opera! It’s a theme.
Heh. It’s rock opera, mostly. Paul Sorvino and Sarah Brightman sing operatically, but everybody else grunges it up.
It’s pretty great, though.
I’ve heard the title a million times but never knew what it was about. Sounds more interesting than I would have thought.
It may be a cup of tea that you enjoy! I could’ve said a lot more about it–and in fact did; this is the short version, if you can imagine that.
Like, for example, all the flashback sequences are rendered as comic book panels, which makes some of the more horrific things that have happened somehow worse than if they’d been dramatized.
Doooooooooooo iiiiiiiiiiiit Penni.
You had me at Paul Sorvino, then lost me at Paris Hilton.
Sounds brilliant, but our love will never be.
Oh my god, then you had me again at Tony Head.
You corrupter.
His part is huge.
I am totally there. With all my heart.
But she’s good in it! And her part is very small! Come baaaaaaaaaaack!
I’M GONNA DO IT!!