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Originally Posted by Gemini Cricket
Also, I always got the feeling that ultimately if the situation was different, she should have been with the phantom. I mean, 'modern day' Raoul didn't seem to be letting go of what happened, focusing more on what she was so torn about than anything else. It always seemed to me that there was regret in Christine's choice (she goes back for one final moment with the phantom - something that in the play and the movie I loved, loved, loved) and a longing in Raoul's sad 'old man character' that seemed Christine's life afterwards was unfulfilled (him clutching onto artifacts of the past to remind him of her etc).
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The lack of age difference was a problem. Also, the lack of severity in his deformity, but someone also pointed out to me that even as he was in the film, people of that time, in France, would have still shunned him. I don't know. I just don't know. *I* certainly wouldn't have had a problem with it.
And his youth in the film also erases all the life he had lived prior. He was in a carnival, but he escpaed and traveled the world. Was a magician, an architect (he helped design the Opera and was involved in its construction), etc.
I think the film did a really good job at showing that Christine was torn at the end. She's like a Persephone. The book goes into a lot more detail about how Raoul's family was opposed to a union with Christine since she was a lady of the stage. And it's very sad that, after they marry, she never goes back to the stage. Knowing she gave up on what was essentially her life's purpose/passion etc. seems to indicate that her story was also a somewhat tragic one, even if she found happiness in marriage.
And, you're right, in the film and play they were together for an evening . But they spent a lot more time alone together in the book, and she did really care for him, though he terrified her.
I do like that the story is a sort of coming of age in every version I've seen. There's Raoul, the child, virginal lover. Christine, the child and virginal heroine. The Phantom...the dark, mysterious prince of Hades who turns out to be just a very unhappy, messed up man, but a man who is unparalleled in his intelligence and various talents. He's the father figure and the sexualized lover of the piece, but this is perverted by his corpse-like appearance and eventual maddness brought on by the temptation of Christine; this sudden desire he has to join the world again.
I think Christine, through her interactions with the Phantom, becomes a woman. But she cannot choose him, and in choosing Raoul she is a woman marrying a man who is still an innocent boy in many ways. She's gone beyond him. And aspects of herself cannot flourish in her presence.
But the life the Phantom would have offered her was one of wish fulfillment (I can live above! I want to join people again. I have masks that look like real faces! We can be married and hold hands and be normal! I don't want to live seperate anymore!) is bleak and unstable. But they would have had a communion in music.