La Seduzione / Seduction

La Seduzione is a key film for anyone interested in Fernando Di Leo. Unfortunately it's also a film that many fans of his action movies will likely dismiss on account of being a melodrama and which those with a more exclusively arthouse orientation will resist as derivative and, in its more explicit scenes, exploitative if hardly pornographic. (As Last Tango in Paris reminds us, the ways in which this kind of 'adult' film and the debates around it are framed are crucial: art or exploitation, erotica or pornography)

I sat this because the subject matter of the drama – a middle-aged man, Giuseppe Lagana, returns to his old home town after years abroad, embarks upon a relationship with a woman his own age, Caterina, and then becomes involved with her adolescent daughter, Graziella – has obvious affinities with Nabokov's Lolita and Kubrick's adaptation of it.

Nevertheless, Seduction is its own film, with less of a paedophiliac subtext given Graziella's older age and greater maturity; the casting of the more womanly 20-year old Jenny Tamburi in the role of Graziella compared to the 15-year-old Sue Lyon in the title role of Kubrick's film; and the fact that the contours of the characters' relationships are different.

Most importantly the film was adapted from a respectable literary source, in the form of the 1970 novel Graziella by the Catanian writer Ettore Patti, which if obviously post-dating Nabokov's novel can also be placed in the context of a writing career stretching back to the 1920s in which he had earlier also approached the subject of Peter Pan syndrome – i.e. men refusing to grow up and accept adult roles and responsibilities.

While it would take an extraordinarily brave critic to favourable compare Di Leo's direction to that of Kubrick, it is clear in any case that Di Leo has his own approach to the subject matter, one that is less detached and observational and more involved.

Similarly, if none of the male players, led by Maurice Ronet in the role of Giuseppe, are quite as memorable as James Mason and Peter Sellers in Lolita, this may also be an advantage insofar as we often now remember Sellers' performances more than the films in which they appeared and characters they related to. As it is, Ronet does well in making his character neither pathetic, nor a monster, but a believable, if flawed, human being whom we may feel for even as we recognise his wrongdoing.

The two female leads, the other being Lisa Gastoni as the mother, are beautifully played, both actresses delivering the kind of brave and sensitive performances that deserved more attention and recognition than they ever received.

Interestingly, Di Leo had originally considered Ornella Muti for the role of Graziella, but was apparently given something of a her-or-me ultimatum by Gastoni and thus went with Tamburi. While there seems little doubt that Muti's presence would have changed the dynamics of the film considerably, if we think of the likes of her work for Damiani as the young bride of The Most Beautiful Wife – itself another film that reminds us of the culturally specific aspects around adolescent sexuality and community moral standards – it's a testament to the under-rated and sadly subsequently under-utilised Tamburi that one also finds it difficult to re-imagine the film without her. Anyone seeking more evidence of her abilities is advised to check her out in Silvio Amadio's Smile Before Death, where she plays a similarly (not so?) innocent victim.

[Some Italian references on Patti and his work:

http://www.girodivite.it/Graziella-di-Ercole-Patti.html
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ercole_Patti
http://nuke.ilsottoscritto.it/Recensioni/RecensioniP/ErcolePattiGraziella/tabid/261/Default.aspx]

Diario segreto da un carcere femminile / Love and Death in a Women's Prison / Women in Cell Block 7

This 1973 women in prison / poliziotto / whatever marked the writing and directorial debut of Rino De Silvestro of Naked Werewolf Woman infamy. Those who've seen that 1976 oddity will pretty much know what to expect: quality sleaze trash that can't quite seem to make up its mind about what sort of film its trying to be.


The two New York mafiosi


And their assassin

We open at full tilt, with a wealth of plot information thrown at us via voice-over in the space of a few minutes: Interpol agents had planned to intercept some American mafioso as they picked up a heroin shipment from their Rome counterparts. Unfortunately another gangster unexpectedly gunned down the mafioso and made off with the drugs. And, before he could be brought in and made to divulge who had informed him of Interpol's plans, he was involved in a fatal car accident. His moll / girlfriend Daniela Vinci (Jenny Tamburi) survived the crash and is jailed as an accomplice despite professing to know nothing about the now-vanished drugs. Seeking to clear up the mystery and her father's name, as the gangster's contact and the suspected mastermind behind the scheme, Hilda (Anita Strindberg) – who is herself an Interpol agent, unbeknownst to her father – goes undercover in the same women's prison. Meanwhile, the mob closes in on her father...






You want realistic sleaze? You've got it – Tamburi undergoes a cavity search

What ensues is an entertaining if not terribly coherent mish-mash of beatings, shoot outs, car chases and prison intrigues, including the obligatory lesbian, shower and catfight sequences and all the stock characters like the sadistic warden, the inmate running the show and not taking kindly to any newcomer challenging her position, and the crazy one.




The stunts are surprisingly decent

Tamburi and Strindberg are certainly game and do the best they can with the material given them, but the actorly pickings are definitely somewhat slim in comparison with their roles in Smile Before Death and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.

This said, the writing is difficult to judge anyway in that much of the dialogue sounds as if it has been substantially rewritten for the English dub by the film's US distributors, Terry Levene's Aquarius, with this also providing some presumably unintentional laughs through frequent dubiously macho references to the inmates balls' and ball-busting one another.






Classic WIP images

There are some moments of inspiration like a crane shot which takes us over one prison wall to reveal another, larger structure behind it; the mournful 99 Women / Caged Heat style blues vocal number that is unexpectedly positioned as diegetic as one prisoner tells another, admittedly positioned offscreen, to shut up, which can probably be attributed to Levene and company; or a shot of Hilda's father, mirrored upside down in a pool of water curiously reminiscent of David Hemmings at the end of Deep Red. The locales for the action sequences are also well chosen in the main, with the prison interiors and bit players also looking authentically lived in and world-weary.


Prisoners like these disappear whenever there's a shower scene


Cue Peter North jokes...

But in general there remains something of the feel of different films and tones battling against each other for dominance – now wanting to be serious and hard-hitting, now schlocky and sleazy. Without wanting to make any claims for De Silvestro as some kind of undiscovered auteur, its worth noting here that Naked Werewolf Woman and Red Light Girls had something of the same distinctive sensibility to them, with the latter offering a curious amalgam of giallo thrills and mondo-esque prostitution expose.

In keeping with the rest of the film, the music is also somewhat schizophrenic, mixing funky action themes with mood music, but even so works well to provide the emotional cues and glue required, particularly during a long dialogue-free sequence of girl-on-girl frottage.

Il Sorriso della iena / Smile Before Death

An open and shut case?

“Here we are sir. She cut her throat with a shard from this broken glass. The post mortem showed she'd been drinking pretty heavily. The door here was locked from the inside. It has to be suicide”

Or so conclude the authorities undertaking the official inquiry into the death of Dorothy Emerson, in a typical display of giallo ineffectiveness.

It's less the end of the affair, however, than the beginning of a whole series of new ones as the dead woman's daughter Nancy (Luciana Della Robbia / Jenny Tamburi) turns up unexpectedly on her mother's estate and quickly realises the truth – or at least enough of it – to be a danger to the conspirators behind the murder and thus in danger herself.

Marco (Silvano Tranquillli), you see, wanted a divorce from his wife and a financial settlement that would resolve his debts, which she saw no reason to give. He is in league with Dorothy's photographer friend Gianna, who has distinct lesbian tendencies and quickly develops an intense attraction to the young woman that threatens to compromise her own position or at least compel its re-evaluation...

To say anything more, however, would run the risk of ruining a taut, extremely well-crafted giallo for the first time viewer.


Blocks of yellow are a important feature of Silvio Amadeo's mise-en-scene, although unfortunately the panning and scanning sometimes seems to conspire against his compositions.

What can be said, however, is that Smile Before Death / Il Sorriso della iena - literally The Smile of the Hyena, and thus the obviously more giallo-sounding title - is a film that not only repays but actually rewards repeat viewings, thanks to numerous subtleties to the dialogue, direction and performances, alternately combining and contradicting one another, along with a convoluted plot that manages to both avoid feeling contrived and to keep the viewer enthralled all the way to a surprise yet retrospectively inevitable finale followed by a sting in the coda that, if maybe a touch deus ex machina, can equally be forgiven for its delicious ironies.


The male gaze, trapped in a woman's body?


Female to-be-looked-at-ness?









Or something a whole lot more complex given all these mirrors, with their multiple images , representations and connotations?

To pick just one moment out of literally dozens: consider the way in which when Nancy falls in the lake – having earlier been informed by Gianna that “the lake is very dangerous at this time” by way of a possible warning – the detail of the accident is obscured from us in a long shot from the perspective of a (convenient) onlooker turned saviour, so that we do not know whether Nancy fell or was pushed, nor quite what to make of her – significantly – unseen but reported nightmare: “I had this awful dream. Marco didn't try to help me. He was going to let me down and he didn't care – he just laughed.”

Its also this kind of thing that gives the film an interpretive richness far beyond the kind of casual summations as exploitative and offensive trash that you could well imagine coming from the pen of more mainstream or politically correct commentators.


Gianna: “Tender like a quivering faun lost in the woods.”
Nancy: “And not finding its mother it takes flight”

For while it might seem doubly exploitative of the film-makers to include a character like Gianna, in that her positioning as bisexual and active bearer of the gaze neatly allows the male spectator to enjoy the spectacle of female flesh without directly being implicated in the scene as voyeur, to me the way it all plays out seems rather to express an honest if seemingly misanthropic statement of the truth as it applies to both real life and giallo film representation: Things are never quite that simple and the equations of male power / guilt and female lack of power / innocence never absolute.














Do I look like a (wo)man who exploits women? Just who is taking advantage of who here?

Indeed, one wonders what sort of readings can be made of the scene where, having finished an intensive photo-session with Nancy, Gianna sighs and languidly removes her camera before then going over to gently caress the young woman: are we here seeing Gianna enjoy masculinised phallicised sexuality through the medium of the penetrative camera to then revert back, post visual / aural suggestions of orgasm, to a more (stereotypically) touchy-feely, non-aggressive ideal(ised) feminine sexuality? Beyond this, what is Nancy's role as the necessary counterpart / complement / complicator in these configurations?








Will the real Nancy please step forward?

The point is whether such questions can be answered definitively – they can't – but that they have rarely been raised with regard to European popular cinema like Smile Before Death, too often dismissed as mere Eurotrash, or else enjoyed but in a not-to-be-taken seriously way that can just end up having the same effect as fan and academic types continue to speak past rather than to each other.

Something similar can be said with regard to the performances, where the intimate nature of the piece – three main characters, three supporting ones – adds to the demands upon Neri, Tranquilli and Tamburi: They have to act as must as be, to convey not just attractiveness, sophistication and guilelessness in the more usual typed way we find in most other gialli (i.e. Edwige Fenech = hysterical woman, George Hilton = suave, suspicious man), but also the performative aspects of such and the tensions that thereby emerge between the 'inner' and 'outer' realms.

Thus, rather than just being Rosalba Neri as the femme fatale, we have Rosalba Neri as the femme fatale whose cold calculations are prone to go awry through the influence of passions she cannot quite control, as with – to again pick out an exemplary moment – the way Gianna cannot quite face Nancy and the truth when the latter intimates that she believes her mother to have been murdered, a little gesture that says an awful lot.


Gianna's look away – Neri's finest moment?

Silvano Tranquili is required not just to embody “The typical Latin lover, passion and jealousy,” as Nancy puts it – the kind of the character that giallo aficionados will have doubtless seen him play time and again – but also to maintaining sufficient distance from this role to convey that it is less of a made-to-measure, fits-like-a-black-glove suit than an off-the-peg one-size sort-of fits-all-but-not-really one, existentially and (in)authentically his own.

It is perhaps Tamburi who delivers the finest performance of all, however, with what could well be the pinnacle of her career. (Regrettably I haven't seen much of her work; what she does here makes me want to rectify that.) Again, it's difficult to really say anything without running the risk of spoiling your enjoyment, but on a repeat viewing you really appreciate what she is doing beyond simply exposing her flesh – even if this in itself may be enough for many.


Note the yellow car

Even more remarkably, all this comes across when watching a less than ideal panned and scanned, English dubbed version of the film – the kind of presentation that, unfortunately, is all we often have with too many films hitherto condemned to be forgotten as less interesting typical examples of a genre or filone.

But, as Smile Before Death (and hopefully this discussion) demonstrate, is there ever really such a thing? Isn't it always that when we consider the individual film and its aesthetics in their its own terms, there is invariably and inevitably more to be said?