Saturday 8 December 2007

La Casa dalle finestre che ridondo / The House with Laughing Windows

“My colours, my colours. They run hot in my veins, Sweet, my colours, so sweet. My colours are soft like the fall. Hot like fresh blood. The liquid falls down my arms. They enter people's minds. My colours they transcend me into darkness. My colours take me so far away, so far. My colours, they flow through my veins. My colours, my colours, they erase everything else. Purity, purity, my colours. My colours will paint death clearly. Death, I can tell. Death is coming. Death is here. Finally – Purification. Holding me at their mercy. Purify me. Death. My colours. I'm dying! I'm dying. Purify me! Purity.”

So proclaims an unidentified, manic voice-off over a slow-motion, sepia-tone image of a man slowly being tortured to death in a ritualistic manner.


The art of torture?

It's a powerful image that raises a number of questions for the subsequent narrative to resolve. Who is speaking? What is the relationship between their monologue and the image? What is the ontological status of all this - dream, memory, reality or some in-between state?

Whichever the case, the screen goes black and we cut to the more 'solid' and 'readable' arrival of a ferry across a flat, uniform landscape that would recall the Holland of Mill of the Stone Women (as another Italian horror film exploring the nexus of madness, art and death) were it not for the absence of iconic windmills. We soon learn that our location is the Po Valley in northern Italy and that the timeframe is not the early 20th century but its midpoint, some years after the end of the war and the fall of fascism.


The mayor, Solmi, and his drunken chauffer, Coppola.

On board the ferry is a young picture restorer, Stefano (Lino Capoliccihio), who has been brought to the village by its mayor, Solmi, to work on the fresco of St. Sebastian's martrydom that adorns one of the walls of its church in the hope that the restored piece, by the mysterious artist Legnani, might prove a tourist attraction.


A detail of the fresco; note that St Sebastian has been pierced with swords rather than the usual arrows

The fresco immediately strikes Stefano: “What an artist! To illustrate death so well!” The priest is, by contrast, somewhat more cynical, opining that the piece is too macabre and an unwanted distraction from the restoration of the church itself. “I discovered this crap was painted by the great Legnani. He left it unfinished, it needs to be restored. So now I have to start all over again. No peace for me!”

Another cut takes us to the village hotel, where Stefano has a room. By now the distinct rhythm of the editing is also becoming evident: we will abruptly cut from one scene to another without an establishing shot or after holding for an extra beat or two on some detail. It's a device that puts one on edge, and works well. The room opposite his is occupied by a woman, another outsider, whom the maid dismisses. “She should stay in her room, doing what she does.”




Some of the locals

Stefano receives a phone call, the first of many which always seem to reach him regardless of where he might be in the village at any given moment. The distinctive voice, perhaps the same one as we heard in the credits sequence, warns him to go away and not to touch the fresco.

Stefano goes to the village trattoria, populated by yet more of the local grotesques, for a meal. The woman from his hotel is also there. She makes a move to sit with him, but is intercepted by Stefano's friend Antonio, another outsider in the village and the one who got him the job.

Antonio is clearly still somewhat troubled but says that he is over his breakdown and that the change of air in the village has been beneficial. He also tells Stefano who the woman is, the local schoolteacher, and that she's a woman of questionable morals who's “been fucked by everyone,” putting an ambiguous slant on the maid's remarks earlier. If Stefano has any designs this way he had better be quick though, in case the woman is expelled.

Turning serious, Antonio asks if Stefano has seen the fresco and states his wish that his friend had waited to go see it with him instead. “I think I've discovered the strangest story ever.” Something stops Antonio from elaborating further, however, possibly the gaze of another of the locals. This prompts Stefano to voice his concerns once more. Antonio attempts to reassure him and indicates that he will call on Stefano later.

Back at the hotel, the schoolteacher and Stefano have tea before going to bed together, although the editing makes it unclear who initiated things and how far they went before concluding with the teacher's “If you feel lonely come back. You know the way.”

The next morning, Stefano meets Antonio as arranged. He starts to tell him about the “house with the laughing windows,” and elaborate further on the Langani's reputation as the “painter of agony,” intimating that the disturbing realism of his work may have been down to murder. The arrival of Solmi stops Antonio from explaining further.

En route to the church in Solmi's chauffered car, Stefano asks him about the painter. Solmi dismisses Antonio's account as bizarre notions, not to be taken seriously. The restorer is not reassured, however, also asking church handyman Lidio, a creepy Luciano Rossi junior type, who might have left the flowers by the fresco (having seen a woman on the opposite bank picking some identical looking ones as he and Antonio were talking) and if he knows anything about the threatening phone call.

We cut to the trattoria where Coppola (Gianni Cavina), Solmi's chauffer, being thrown out for drunkenness yet again threatens or rants: “You know that, if I wanted to... You know what I could do!”, prompting the owner, Poppi to come over to Stefano's table and reassure him:

“You are here for the painting?”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, everybody knows everything here. And thanks to Solmi, things improved a lot here. He's a brave man. Thought he's not tall, he's big. He has led the village to unity and prosperity.”

Poppi invites Stefano to see some of Legnani's paintings, all in the same distinctive style. One in particular catches the young man's attention: a female nude with a male head. According to Poppi his wife, who passes in the background and is the same one as Stefano saw picking flowers earlier, was the model, although he then contradicts himself by indicating that the artist, dominated by and afraid of women, never managed to find one to be his model.

A soft-focus scene, depicting the tortured artist at work ensues, followed by yet another phone call for Stefano. The caller is Antonio, needing to speak with him: “Don't mention my name. I need to speak with you. I must tell you the rest of the horrible story. I'm at the hotel, in your room.”

Stefano goes to meet his friend, but arrives to see him take a fatal dive out the hotel window. Looking up, a shadowy figure is apparent behind the curtain, while another unseen witness remarks that “someone pushed him from upstairs.” As a small crowd gathers, however, an old woman we see voices a different opinion: “Oh God! He took his own life! I knew it!!”

It is this view that prevails the next morning as Stefano talks with the local carabinieri, earlier seen helping expel Coppola from the trattoria. There is no motive for murder, and no evidence either, he explains. “Soon you'll understand. This is no place for a young man,” with all the young women of the village having left for the city...






A shot from early in the film and the concluding images, as another figure stops by the tree in front of the church

Perhaps the best route into La Casa dalle finestre che ridondo / The House with Laughing Windows is as the giallo equivalent of The Wicker Man, as films which are somewhat tangential to their genres and which will probably appeal to the kind of arthouse audience for whom a straight Argento or Hammer film is a touch low-class.

The problem that the genre aficionado may have, meanwhile, is the sense that Pupi Avati's 'superiority' to his material prevents him from fully embracing it; that he doesn't really believe in what he's doing except for at the level of an exercise in making a low-budget genre-type film.

Though technically the film is accomplished, and certainly far better directed than its British counterpart, the plotting is awkward.

The relationship of the locals to their shared secret and the outsiders in their midst simply doesn't convince. In The Wicker Man, we come to understand the islanders' logic: their crops have failed, they need a special sacrifice to appease the gods and the whole situation is contrived and orchestrated to achieve this end. Here, however, there's no comparable overriding sense of community, with too many outsiders - Coppola, the teacher - whose presence you feel would surely have become problematic long before Stefano arrives. Moreover, the mostri were/are themselves seemingly as prone to preying upon members of the community as anyone else.

With a more overtly fantastique approach this wouldn't itself matter, insofar as a cinematic logic of effect would take over from narrative logic of plausibility. Intriguingly, however, cinematic logic wasn't entirely the province of genre filmmakers, with Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs - from who I draw the notion - tellingly citing Alain Robe-Grillet's notion of literary generators in their formulation. Or, to put it another way, Avati's problem is again that his House is neither arthouse or grindhouse enough, too constrained by a safe, bourgeois notion of good taste.


Stefano finds the titular house

In this regard, one also notes his decidedly coy rather than exploitation- or art-film handling of the love scenes (i.e. Jess Franco = trash = pornography, Robe-Grillet = art = eroticism, as far as dominant assumptions go). While this is a trait that the film shares with Argento's early gialli, it cannot be readily explained away by reference to characters and situations as it can in, for example, the Giordani / Anna Terzi interlude in Cat o' Nine Tails. Fundamentally there's something wrong if Stefano's activities with the purportedly loose woman and her respectable replacement are depicted in exactly the same discrete, let's draw a veil over this manner. (It would be different if the two encounters had been given the same more explicit treatment, as a means of showing that, contrary to appearances, the behaviour of both women was identical.)


Yet another giallo tape recorder

Approaching the film as a giallo - here we can note the importance of a tape recorded aural fragment, a diary and a photograph as the story progresses, along with the McGuffin of the titular house itself - and looking for clues to the identity of the murderer(s) there really aren't that many suspects. Other aspects of the same character(s) presentation cheat a little too much, again suggesting that awkward in-between position, in this case between our full knowledge of the facts, suggesting suspense, and deliberately misleading us, suggesting shock.

Then again as the example of Psycho shows, even Hitchcock didn't always practice what he preached here, sometimes finding it necessary to reverse the implicit hierarchy of suspense as superior to shock. It's also to the filmmakers credit here that, in retrospect, the concluding revelation is somewhat foreshadowed if one looks and listens closely. One just wishes, however, they had had the courage to use this approach throughout and not, for instance, deployed a crude musical stinger as Lidio hands over a jerry can to an unidentified arm, instead letting his vague reply to Stefano's earlier question about its contents and a now you see it now you don't approach make the audience work through its potential significance that bit more.

All this probably makes it sound as though I didn't like The House with Laughing Windows. On the contrary, it has a lot of plus points: It's well directed, acted, shot, scored and edited, and has a strong atmosphere and sense of place. I think it's that because of all these plus points and the sense that it almost achieves greatless which made me that bit more aware of its arthouse and exploitation fence-sitting and, in the end, that overall impression of disingenuousness, of trading in genre cinema without honestly being committed to it in itself.




All the colours of the dark - Stefano enters a mysterious space

With a little bit more conviction, this could have been up there with Deep Red - a film where everything does come together, the non-sequiturs adding to the overriding impression of a shadowy world behind the everyday one - as one of the masterpieces of the giallo. As is, it's perhaps more a Don't Torture a Duckling for those who have a problem with Fulci's purportedly stereotypical, reactionary attitudes to southern Italians, or who are just uncomfortable admitting to themselves that the presence of a naked Barbara Bouchet or a gruesome spectacle of a priest having his face smashed in are a major part of the reason for watching...

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw this a couple of months ago and didn't care much for it - it's well crafted, but a couple of things simply didn't work for me.
I suppose there are similarities to the Wicker man, but I never felt that the backstory was convincingly explained - unlike in the Wicker Man, the islanders in House seemed to be mostly unaware of the secret - they might know something's wrong, but they don't know exactly what the secret is and are more concerned about the overall reputation of the island.
The story seems to be more about apathy and ambiguity than some big conspiracy and while more artfully done than in most giallos, the introduction of the locals is little more than weirdness for the sake of being weird.
The biggest problem is the main character though - I can see what Avati was trying to do here, but by the end of the movie Stefano simply comes across as embarrasingly weak instead of being the powerless victim of a well-sprung trap (Spoilers: The love story is the biggest mistake here I think, given the way Stefano is lured to the final confrontation (the phone call) , it's simply annoying to see him wuss out when he finally meets the killers, by this point even Gandhi'd probably have grabbed at least some sort of weapon to defend himself and Stefano should be out for revenge anyway).
Having an ambivalent hero worked in the Wicker Man, but here you simply end up with someone who almost deserves to be killed for his blunders and ineffectuality alone.

More spoilers:
The second big problem is the reveal of the killers' identities - for a director that obviously feels he's meant to direct more artful stuff, Avati handeles the big revelation laughably inept - simply having the priest lines dubbed by an actress (this might be different in the original version though, I've only seen a dubbed version) is such a ludicrous technique that it destroys all the clever stuff that came before - Avati's feeling of superiority is tangible throughout the movie, but in the end he is only capable to come up with a device even Lenzi or Franco would have been embarassed to use and even the excuse that Avati wasn't trying to direct another giallo applies in this case.

Anonymous said...

I can't say I agree with your assumptions, KH (and anonymous commenter): I never felt Avati had the notion that he is above the material. There is nothing "snobbish" about the film.

This is not an arty giallo, or even a giallo. Avati always does his own thing (if he'd think he is above horror, he wouldn't make classic-style horror films when nobody else does them anymore). This is a horror-mystery, Avati style. Just because it's italian it's not necessarily a giallo.

K H Brown said...

Hi Wostry

I will admit that I haven't seen much of Avati's output and that my knowledge of him is a somewhat second hand. In The BFI Companion to Italian Cinema, his entry indicates, if I remember correctly, that he 'graduated' from genre films to more serious/artistic ones, and I'm sure I've also read somewhere of his despairing when horror fans know him only as the House with Laughing Windows (or maybe Zeder) guy.

In the interview on the Image DVD he comes across as a likeable enough chap. To me, however, it was what he said about the way in which the film was one he made on a low budget with a minimal crew on the back of a more prestigious project, from a script that had been sitting at the back of a drawer for five years. It made it sound more like a "run for cover" project or a technical exercise than a particularly important film for him.

The issue of labels is a difficult one in my opinion: I agree that just because it's Italian it's not necessarily a giallo, but then a horror-mystery would tend to suggest a strong 'family resemblance' with the giallo to me and, I would contend, in those reference works which usually seem to include it as such.

This said, giallo is obviously a very loose term with a somewhat flexible and at times convenient application. But I also wonder about the hierarchy of the different terms here, the way that giallo might suggest trash whereas psychological or suspense thriller is (more) respectable. This is also something you hear about The Wicker Man as a thriller rather than a horror film (though maybe I was a bit off with that as a reference point) even as Hardy and Schaffer happily went about casting Christopher Lee and had thought about Peter Cushing for the Howie role.

If we approach the film as a murder-mystery, Avati-style, what are the distinctive things that help redeem it - what should I or someone else unfamiliar with his work be looking for as the Avati touch? Or is it a lesser film that happens to be more readily available and to have acquired a cult reputation that's proving awkward insofar as it then attracts an audience - including myself, it would seem - who can't properly contextualise it in auteur rather than genre terms?

Cheers

Keith

Anonymous said...

He seems to have softened his views somewhat in recent years, but Avati always made it very clear in the 80's / early 90's that he regarded House... and Zeder as minor movies mostly done for the money and always downplayed his participation.
It has to be said though that Avatis is only a fairly minor "serious / artistic" director and his recent change of heart might also have a lot to do with funding, general changes in attitude towards popular culture and the realisation that it might be better to be known as a great genre director than a mediocre "artist".
House might not ba a giallo, but just because it's Avati doesn't mean it's somehow exempt from criticism and as a suspense thriller or giallo it simply doesn't work very well.

Anonymous said...

KH,

I'm the last man on Earth who would badmouth the giallo as a genre (I don't want to go the Christopher Lee-route, he always says "fantastique" instead of horror, give me a f****** break! :), and if HOUSE... would feel like a giallo to me, I'd be the first one to label it as one. It just doesn't... :)

Nigel M said...

regarding the wicker man comparison:

in the wicker man sacrafice was justified in order to save crops.
or at least qualify the remarks.

The "crops" of House with Laughing Windows surely is the tourist industry which sustains the local economy, the restored painting being one of the pillars of a revived tourist industry. Could it not be argued then that the local populatoin are not really being conspiritorial as such, just covering up the unsavoury fact that there is a serial killer(s) in their midst. In a way it makes them complicit but only in the sense of the mayor in Jaws.. it didnt make him in league with the shark.

There are references in the film to the mayor promoting tourism and being a unifying force.

With the wicker man the conspiracy was to kill howie for the crops but I didnt read this conspiracy as anything so involved. rather that the villagers wanted the dark side to their community covered up.

there was clearly a division between those who wanted the painting restored for the sake of the tourist industry and those who wanted it covered up for what it would reveal.

Nigel M said...

the phrase-

or at least qualify the remarks.

was a pasting error, and makes no sense to post above so ignore those words, read round them :)


oh and kh I am surprised you didn't like devil has 7 faces a way back, it may be lightweight but the film has a naive charm all of its own.

K H Brown said...

Thanks again for your insights and comments guys.

Wostry - we'll just have to agree to disagree on where we situate The House with Laughing Windows. I'm right with you on Chris Lee BTW; my friend and I have a running joke going on about how many names Lee will drop in any given interview or commentary as having known ;-)

Herman - the tourism as crops idea makes sense, as does how this might divide the population of the village given the painters' and by extension their dirty little secret. In real life I think you see this whenever there's a serial killer discovered and it alternately embarrasses a community or provides then with something marketable.

In Edinburgh, where I live, I think you actually get murder scene type tours. But only if the murder is suitably juicy and distanced from us. I wouldn't be surprised if there are similar things elsewhere, while in the case of the scenario presented in the film the murder-art aspect would undoubtedly add that extra frisson.

Nigel M said...

this then of course leaves the question of the dissapearing bodies- now that could be the sisters doing or again the community who know about the bodies attempting to prevent negative publicity.

The thing about the tourist industry came up early in the film and I read the villagers action in these terms. Sort of an antithesis to a wicker man scenario which was designed to lead howie to something ie his martyrdom, this was more leading Stefano away from something.

In practice this makes the villagers implicated (but not for the intent of protecting killers).

as to the debate about whether this is giallo at all, I ve understood giallo in terms of its pulp roots- though given that the cinema giallo has defined its own genre rules beyond the agatha christie type whodunnit.

The fact that giallo exists at all its bound to have some influence on italian cinema understanding of cinematic crime fiction. There does seem to be a lot of cross polenation when it comes to italian genre cinema where we see aspects of westerns in post apocalyptic stuff such as new barbarians and subtle hints of giallo in films such as anthropophagus. It does not necessarily mean that in this instance the intent was to make a giallo as such.

I was also considering your suggestion of director fence sitting, but will when I get a chance blog about this on bloody italiana because there is much I want to write on that, given that its been subject also of an ongoing email exchange between myself and joe from filmforno blog- in particular as what i see as a dialectic relationship between "high art" and populist cinema, both incedentally I see as forms of exploitation cinema, except the difference being the class composition of the target audience. where I see taglines such as "winner of 7 oscars" or "banned in 32 countries" being different forms of the same exploitation marketing techniques- i will elaborate as soon as I get a chance to write up soimething more in depth.

Anonymous said...

This film is genuinely creepy, especially the wacked-out monologue you quote in the beginnin of your post, but the narrative details leave a lot to be desire.

It bugs me that Stefan is hired by a rich man to restore this painting in the hope of generating tourism; then, after he finishes his restoration, someone destroys the painting, and the reaction around town is a collective shrug of indfference. We just have to assume there is a "conspiracy of silence" - it's a plot device not really justified by the plot.

And there are too many people in town who are old enough to know the identity of the killer(s) despite the changed names and/or disguises. We just have to assume they all have reasons for keeping silent, whether or not the script provides a reason.