‘Suppose I have an indifferent expression whilst you peel the fruit.’
By accident, a young teaching assistant intercepts a steamy phone call between two women. He tracks one of them down and becomes her lover. The other woman who was on the line turns out to be the girl’s attractive older stepmother, and the two seem to have an involved and difficult relationship, but is everything as it appears to be?
Offbeat Italian Giallo thriller from director and co-writer Damiano Damiani, which emerges as far more of a character study than a conventional murder mystery. The motivations of the principals are largely left unexplored, and differing interpretations of the events on screen are possible, even after the final wrap up.
The handsome Alberto (Jean Sorel) is cruising through life on a wave of good looks, charm and family riches. However, there is one cloud on his bright horizon; his brother is terminally ill. Superficially, it’s of no real consequence to him; he avoids dealing with it, leaving all the organisation and heartache to his sister-in-law, Marina (María Cuadra). In a revealing scene, he even taunts her about her future plans; accusing the grieving widow-to-be of already fantasising about her next lover, at the same time that her husband, (and his brother, don’t forget!), is dying slowly in the room next door.
‘Do you come here often?’
So it’s no surprise that, when on an errand to pick up an oxygen tank at the start of the film, he doesn’t know what to buy. A quick phone call home would seem to be in order but, instead, he gets a crossed line and a front-row seat to a risque conversation between two women. He tracks one of them down (how, exactly?) and finds that she is pretty young brunette Claudia (Catherine Spaak). Although she already has a boyfriend, Pietro (Gigi Proietti), she’s not shy about taking other lovers. After all, the first time they meet, she’s trying to use her feminine wiles on a priest (Gino Lavagetto), so he’ll give her a deal on some antiques!
The only fly in the ointment would seem to be Spaak’s stepmother, Greta (Florinda Bolkan). The two share a luxurious house some of the time, but Spaak hints that the two had an inappropriate relationship when she was underage which has left her emotionally traumatised. Nevertheless, the two young lovers then embark on the sort of romantic shenanigans that most young lovers do. They have sex in a room in a brothel where a young girl hung herself and pretend to be TV producers so they can humiliate virginal schoolgirl Viola (Gabriella Grimaldi). This is a particularly cruel and heartless act and, although things don’t go very far, director Damiani makes this a very uncomfortable scene for the audience.
His fate was to be trapped forever in a late 1960s movie…
It’s plain through all these developments that Spaak is quite the puppet master, using whatever she has to hand to push Sorel’s buttons, including the presence of her on-off boyfriend Piroletti. She provokes him into defending her honour with his fists, plays with his voyeuristic tendencies and soon has him firmly on the hook. Having said that, Sorel needs little persuasion to go along with everything. At first, it seems that he may be using the new relationship as a distraction from his brother’s impending demise. However, it’s soon taken centre stage in his life, and he always prepared to listen to Spaak talking about her seeming hatred for Bolkan.
So this is all straight film noir 101, right? The femme fatale convincing the hapless hero to do her murderous bidding and then leaving him in the lurch. He ends up behind bars, and she reaps the financial rewards of their crime with her real lover. Only it’s not. For a start, we get no concrete information about anyone’s financial circumstances, and no-one seems exactly short of cash. Sorel’s teaching job is only ever mentioned in passing, and he seems to have all the free time in the world. Spaak has an apartment where she paints as well as living with Bolkan, and, again, spends her days as she pleases. Perhaps Bolkan’s death would make her a rich young woman, but that’s never inferred by anything that’s said or done.
‘Love me, love my hat.’
Instead, there’s another way to read the film. Sorel is ever-present on screen, and we see events through his eyes. And, by the end of it, I think it’s fair to say that he’s a pretty unreliable narrator. At the start of the film when he listens into Spaak and Bolkan’s phone call, he imagines both of them naked and daubed in body paint in a series of pop art tableaux. All very dated and 1960s, of course. As a modern audience, we tend to accept that approach as just an affectation of the era’s style, but what if it’s actually present for a narrative purpose? Is the intention to demonstrate Sorel’s tendency to over-romanticise and fictionalise everyday life? There are certainly some scenes towards the end of the picture where Sorel seems to be mentally unravelling.
Interpreting the film in this way gives us a different angle on Spaak’s character as well, and she comes across more like an emotionally stunted child-woman; impulsive, chronically selfish and demanding. A little unstable, but nowhere near beyond redemption. A couple of scenes in particular support this reading, including the one where she shoots her image in the mirror in a sudden fit of self-loathing. There’s also the climax of the sequence with schoolgirl Grimaldi. Sorel wants to continue with the young girl’s humiliation but Spaak seems to realise that they’ve gone too far and, just for a moment, seems genuinely upset about what they’ve done. This develops no further, but only because they are interrupted by the arrival of Grimaldi’s teenage boyfriend and his crew.
‘Which one of us is supposed to be complicated?’
It’s often a sign of quality when a film can provoke such analysis, but, unfortunately, the results here are a little bit of a mixed bag. Spaak is genuinely terrific in her part, and she’s well-supported by Giallo mainstays Sorel and Bolkan, although the latter gets too little to do. And that is a problem with the film in general; it’s a very slow burn, although repeated viewings help. The dialogue is also borderline pretentious on occasion, and we get an implied critique of the lifestyle of the idle rich, which was a very common theme in Italian cinema of the era. That might account for the fact that the film had some problems with domestic censorship because there’s nothing else here that would explain that somewhat baffling circumstance.
Those expecting a typical Giallo kill ride may well check out on this film early on. For everyone else, it’s a mildly intriguing experience boosted by a strong cast.
Mark David Welsh 