I watched the poliziotto Roma Violenta last night. I thoroughly enjoyed it for the most part, for its no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners approach and the perhaps dubious enthusiasm which Maurizio Merli always seems to bring to the Inspector Betti role. I did feel it flagged a bit towards the end compared to, say, Napoli Violenta, perhaps because there was no strongly personified antagonist for Betti's crusade against crime in general. Admittedly this is maybe a good thing ideologically – i.e. the traditionally Hollywood good guys / bad guys, let's clean up this town notions are problematised – and it certainly helps in conveying the sense of a society falling apart.
What the film also made me wonder about, in combination with the various other poliziotto I've seen over the past few years is whether Mikel Koven's vernacular cinema thesis, that there are certain films which have no aspirations towards art and should be read for their social value for their target audience, might be better applied to the poliziotto than the giallo.
What I mean is that I've seen plenty of gialli that I feel run counter to Koven's thesis in consciously aspiring to art to a greater or lesser degree, but all the Italian cop films I've seen have been straightforward entertainments with a functional – and generally effective – mise-en-scene, relatively simple narratives and characterisations and plenty of “attractions” and emotional pay-offs. The one exception would be Ricky Tognazzi's La Scorta, which is a later film, with a different social / political context, and one I'm not sure even fits into the genre / filone.
So, for those who know more about the Italian cop film than I do, were there any more obviously aspirational, less vernacular films? Those of Fernando Di Leo, perhaps? Is / was there a distinction in the labels and descriptions used, so that a filmmaker like Umberto Lenzi made poliziotto whilst his art-house counterparts made contemporary set political dramas that just happened to feature police protagonists? And what would be some examples of the art-house / crossover cop film if such exist?
Friday, 22 June 2007
Wednesday, 20 June 2007
Random thoughts on Sleepless
I watched Sleepless again earlier this evening. It's a film I can appreciate but have not been able to quite embrace whole-heartedly. I think I'm starting to understand why: I just find it to be too calculated, too concerned with giving the audience what it wants. I realise that this was what Argento needed at that point in time, coming off the disappointing critical and commercial responses to Trauma, The Stendhal Syndrome and Phantom of the Opera – the first two being films I think are much maligned, perhaps on account of being more authentic and personal works, and which I find continue to get better with each additional viewing and passing year.
What also struck me this time is how the film seems very much like the inverse of Phenomena, as a similar exercise in revisiting past themes; that way in which with both films you can almost go through them scene by scene, picking out the intertextual reference points and allusions.
One difference is that with Phenomena, I get the sense Argento was making a film for himself and trusting that his core audience would have faith and come along for the ride. With Sleepless, 15 years later, I gets the sense that he was no longer confident of this audience – if indeed it even still existed, or had not changed composition dramatically – and accordingly sought to make a film for them, for better or worse. (Trauma would, I suppose, be midway between these two positions, for its simultaneous adoption of elements of the slasher film and its subversion of the same with the giallo and an overriding seriousness.)
Another difference is that with Phenomena I still get that sense of a film-maker going forward or at least underscoring a phase in his career. With Sleepless, however, it at times seems more like a scoring out of the previous decade's work, of saying that it represented (perhaps necessary) dead ends and digressions.
There is one significant exception: with the character of Ulysses Moretti I think we see Argento – no longer of course, a young man, even if my (our?) mental image of him remains as such – addressing issues of ageing and mortality in a new, genuinely mature, way. Perhaps its the Bergman influence exerting itself through the presence of Max Von Sydow in the role, perhaps the expressionist influence on both filmmakers, but for some reason I'm reminded of Wild Strawberries...
What also struck me this time is how the film seems very much like the inverse of Phenomena, as a similar exercise in revisiting past themes; that way in which with both films you can almost go through them scene by scene, picking out the intertextual reference points and allusions.
One difference is that with Phenomena, I get the sense Argento was making a film for himself and trusting that his core audience would have faith and come along for the ride. With Sleepless, 15 years later, I gets the sense that he was no longer confident of this audience – if indeed it even still existed, or had not changed composition dramatically – and accordingly sought to make a film for them, for better or worse. (Trauma would, I suppose, be midway between these two positions, for its simultaneous adoption of elements of the slasher film and its subversion of the same with the giallo and an overriding seriousness.)
Another difference is that with Phenomena I still get that sense of a film-maker going forward or at least underscoring a phase in his career. With Sleepless, however, it at times seems more like a scoring out of the previous decade's work, of saying that it represented (perhaps necessary) dead ends and digressions.
There is one significant exception: with the character of Ulysses Moretti I think we see Argento – no longer of course, a young man, even if my (our?) mental image of him remains as such – addressing issues of ageing and mortality in a new, genuinely mature, way. Perhaps its the Bergman influence exerting itself through the presence of Max Von Sydow in the role, perhaps the expressionist influence on both filmmakers, but for some reason I'm reminded of Wild Strawberries...
Fantom Kiler
Over on Groovy Age of Horror there's an interesting thread with some early 1990s erotic grotesque fumetti – well, they're erotic horror, but the Japanese phrase seems very apposite. I found one of them, in which a man builds a masturbation machine, using the severed hands of a succession of female victims, so marvellously perverse.
It also got me to thinking about a notorious underground giallo type film from a few years back, Fantom Kiler, which I ended up watching again to see if my initial very negative reactions would be any different this time round...
The short answer is no – the film is the kind of thing which can only give the giallo and the fans of Eurocult cinema an even worse name among the mainstream media, were it to ever creep onto their radar. The longer one... well, read on...
Episode 1:
Two station attendants watch a beautiful, unattainable woman. One or both of them imagine her naked, reminiscent of Meyer's The Immoral Mr Teas. Coming over to ask them what they find so fascinating, the woman, now seen clothed, slips, exposing her breasts and that she is wearing no panties. Declining the men's dubious offers of help. she leaves, not noticing that she has dropped her keys, which the men pick up. One suggests that he will be seeing her, as a close-up of his eye segues us into the next sequence.
Classic giallo iconography put to dubious use; note the Bisongrass Vodka bottle in lieu of J&B in the purportedly Polish production.
Walking through the woods, the woman becomes lost and progressively loses her clothes through a series of contrivances, including a randomly barbed wire fence in her way – shades of Suspiria's room filled with razor wire, if we want to desperately search for a reference point / justification for sitting through the film perhaps?
Finally - the extended stalking sequence being marked by the absence of obvious POV shots from the killer's position, insofar as most of the camera set-ups conveniently position us with a full frontal view even if a supernatural element might then serve as justification – she meets the Fantom Kiler, dressed a la Blood and Black Lace and wielding a large knife for maximum phallic symbolism.
He then proceeds to menace and verbally taunt her. While this is useful for the film-makers as way of expressing his – and more worryingly perhaps also their – twisted philosophy, such as it is, it also serves to undercut the iconic potential of the figure when we remember that his more realistically grounded predecessors invariably declined to speak. (Think, for instance, of the aforementioned Blood and Black Lace, with the mute figure writing his question, “where is the diary” on a notepad.)
At least the banal presentation of the perfunctory investigation scenes is true to the prevailing norms of the giallo form; the detective's remarks seem like a convenient get-out for the film-makers and their target audience, however .
Two of the under-achievers, with the safe, convenient distance of Benny Hill-esque parody.
Then, inevitably, he slashes her repeatedly, before finishing with several thrusts of his blade to her groin. Due to the lack of special effects and poor technique the scene is nowhere near as nasty or shocking as it sounds, especially when compared with similar moments in the likes of The New York Ripper, Crimes of the Black Cat or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
The exception is in terms of its sheer lack of taste, by way of the gloating, she-asked-for-it attitude. It's not that filmmakers should ever be self-censoring and refuse to admit of or explore the dark side of human desire, more that there one gets the sense here that all they wanted to do was shock.
This might seem a curious thing for me to say, given that in the case of The New York Ripper I recently argued that Fulci and his collaborators did not have any particular misogynistic or psychosexual axe to grind and were instead just seeking to be as hard hitting as possible, but there at least there were also narrative, characterisation and subtext to keep one engaged and, most importantly, a denouement that is ultimately as if not more terrifying in its absolute bleakness than anything in the preceding 90-odd minutes.
Come morning the police find the body, leading to a flashback from another similar case a year ago, in which a naked woman is menaced with a power drill; similar moments punctuate the main episodes and have a tendency to show the limitations of the digital video equipment being used, as with an otherwise potentially interesting set up where one victim loses her glasses to allow scope for some split-focus type effects.
Episode 2:
Meanwhile at the station one of the attendants has been taken ill, leading to the arrival of his replacement, a woman who proceeds to engage in assorted scantily clad floor and window cleaning. She then demonstrates the strength of her buttock muscles by inviting the other attendant to attempt to pull out a wooden spoon she clenches between them, inevitably winning the contest, the wager of one weeks' wages and – you sense – the imminent wrath of the Fantom Kiler.
Before this, however, the other attendant is called into the police station for a chat about the case, it so happening that the officer heading the investigation is also his brother. The attendants recollections of what he was doing on the day in question leads to another Mr Teas type sequence, as the two layabouts ogle the invariably scantily clad women, including one whose rebuff signals the Fantom's next appearance.
Note the obvious cut out blade
At this point, however, these recollections spill over into the next extended stalk, strip and kill sequence as the woman unwittingly gets into a taxi driven by the Fantom. There's a brief moment of wit here, as the woman asks him why he wears the mask, getting the response that he was in an accident and is quite badly scarred; an answer that's accepted at face value and wouldn't perhaps be out of place in many proper gialli.
The car then breaks down in the middle of the woods. There's a series of three cuts in on the red headlight of the car, getting closer each time, that indicates the Argento influence and a more general hint of Suspiria to the lighting, even if again the paucity of resources proves a limitation. But, all too soon we are again back into more mundane territory as the Kiler discovers he needs something to tie the fan belt back into the engine, giving the woman a reason to take the bottom half of her clothes off and, before long, her top as well - her hot pants fall under the taxi and so she takes off her boob tube to be able to better stretch under it.
The Killer then takes a hammer and a chisel and is about to strike the blade into the unwitting woman's anus, the attempts at suspense backfiring on account of some unconvincing impossible camera angles from what would have to be the brown-eye-view, before another woman unexpectedly shows up and asks if she can help.
The killer then strips her naked and glides his chisel across her body before stabbing her in the groin with it. Again what could be unbearable comes across as laughable, especially when he then drags her bloodless, seemingly unharmed form away. Taxi woman remains oblivious to all this, as she is still busy retrieving her hot pants from under the vehicle, then discovers the killer's accoutrements in the boot of the vehicle – too late...
A potentially worthwhile composition ruined by technical inability?
Episode 3:
Back in the station and the female attendant's girlfriend shows up, revealing that she only took on the post for bet. The two women return home and prepare for some lovemaking, at which point the Fantom shows up. He slits the girlfriend's throat - there are lashings of gore here, but the effect is negated by a blade that is more fake than the breast implants of the female performers - then deals with the attendant, who seems quite into their S&M games until she's handcuffed and helpless and he pulls her girlfriend's severed head out of his bag...
There's perhaps five minutes of decent spoof / parody material here, but as for the rest it's so calculated and as a result ineffectual in its attempts to shock. Perhaps it's desensitisation after years of watching what are by most people's standards pretty extreme films. I would prefer to think of it as a re-sensitisation, as to what a good giallo specifically or sex / horror hybrid generally can actually accomplish, however.
Pseudonyms galore; like Snuff, none of those who appeared in this film were ever heard from again...
Though purportedly of Polish origin – bottles of Bisongrass Vodka perform a function analogous to the beloved J&B bottle – the film would appear to in fact have been clandestinely produced in the UK with its director hiding behind a pseudonym. While probably a wise move legally – exactly what is the BBFC's policy on the insertion of wooden spoon and broom handles into the rectum, even if only implied? – and in terms of helping establish a certain mystique around the film, one really cannot emphasise enough that this is one of those films that would be better left to hopefully disappear. Sadly, however, with two sequels and an out-and-out hardcore porn offshoot, it would seem that too many of us were curious and / or believed the hype...
It also got me to thinking about a notorious underground giallo type film from a few years back, Fantom Kiler, which I ended up watching again to see if my initial very negative reactions would be any different this time round...
The short answer is no – the film is the kind of thing which can only give the giallo and the fans of Eurocult cinema an even worse name among the mainstream media, were it to ever creep onto their radar. The longer one... well, read on...
Episode 1:
Two station attendants watch a beautiful, unattainable woman. One or both of them imagine her naked, reminiscent of Meyer's The Immoral Mr Teas. Coming over to ask them what they find so fascinating, the woman, now seen clothed, slips, exposing her breasts and that she is wearing no panties. Declining the men's dubious offers of help. she leaves, not noticing that she has dropped her keys, which the men pick up. One suggests that he will be seeing her, as a close-up of his eye segues us into the next sequence.
Classic giallo iconography put to dubious use; note the Bisongrass Vodka bottle in lieu of J&B in the purportedly Polish production.
Walking through the woods, the woman becomes lost and progressively loses her clothes through a series of contrivances, including a randomly barbed wire fence in her way – shades of Suspiria's room filled with razor wire, if we want to desperately search for a reference point / justification for sitting through the film perhaps?
Finally - the extended stalking sequence being marked by the absence of obvious POV shots from the killer's position, insofar as most of the camera set-ups conveniently position us with a full frontal view even if a supernatural element might then serve as justification – she meets the Fantom Kiler, dressed a la Blood and Black Lace and wielding a large knife for maximum phallic symbolism.
He then proceeds to menace and verbally taunt her. While this is useful for the film-makers as way of expressing his – and more worryingly perhaps also their – twisted philosophy, such as it is, it also serves to undercut the iconic potential of the figure when we remember that his more realistically grounded predecessors invariably declined to speak. (Think, for instance, of the aforementioned Blood and Black Lace, with the mute figure writing his question, “where is the diary” on a notepad.)
At least the banal presentation of the perfunctory investigation scenes is true to the prevailing norms of the giallo form; the detective's remarks seem like a convenient get-out for the film-makers and their target audience, however .
Two of the under-achievers, with the safe, convenient distance of Benny Hill-esque parody.
Then, inevitably, he slashes her repeatedly, before finishing with several thrusts of his blade to her groin. Due to the lack of special effects and poor technique the scene is nowhere near as nasty or shocking as it sounds, especially when compared with similar moments in the likes of The New York Ripper, Crimes of the Black Cat or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
The exception is in terms of its sheer lack of taste, by way of the gloating, she-asked-for-it attitude. It's not that filmmakers should ever be self-censoring and refuse to admit of or explore the dark side of human desire, more that there one gets the sense here that all they wanted to do was shock.
This might seem a curious thing for me to say, given that in the case of The New York Ripper I recently argued that Fulci and his collaborators did not have any particular misogynistic or psychosexual axe to grind and were instead just seeking to be as hard hitting as possible, but there at least there were also narrative, characterisation and subtext to keep one engaged and, most importantly, a denouement that is ultimately as if not more terrifying in its absolute bleakness than anything in the preceding 90-odd minutes.
Come morning the police find the body, leading to a flashback from another similar case a year ago, in which a naked woman is menaced with a power drill; similar moments punctuate the main episodes and have a tendency to show the limitations of the digital video equipment being used, as with an otherwise potentially interesting set up where one victim loses her glasses to allow scope for some split-focus type effects.
Episode 2:
Meanwhile at the station one of the attendants has been taken ill, leading to the arrival of his replacement, a woman who proceeds to engage in assorted scantily clad floor and window cleaning. She then demonstrates the strength of her buttock muscles by inviting the other attendant to attempt to pull out a wooden spoon she clenches between them, inevitably winning the contest, the wager of one weeks' wages and – you sense – the imminent wrath of the Fantom Kiler.
Before this, however, the other attendant is called into the police station for a chat about the case, it so happening that the officer heading the investigation is also his brother. The attendants recollections of what he was doing on the day in question leads to another Mr Teas type sequence, as the two layabouts ogle the invariably scantily clad women, including one whose rebuff signals the Fantom's next appearance.
Note the obvious cut out blade
At this point, however, these recollections spill over into the next extended stalk, strip and kill sequence as the woman unwittingly gets into a taxi driven by the Fantom. There's a brief moment of wit here, as the woman asks him why he wears the mask, getting the response that he was in an accident and is quite badly scarred; an answer that's accepted at face value and wouldn't perhaps be out of place in many proper gialli.
The car then breaks down in the middle of the woods. There's a series of three cuts in on the red headlight of the car, getting closer each time, that indicates the Argento influence and a more general hint of Suspiria to the lighting, even if again the paucity of resources proves a limitation. But, all too soon we are again back into more mundane territory as the Kiler discovers he needs something to tie the fan belt back into the engine, giving the woman a reason to take the bottom half of her clothes off and, before long, her top as well - her hot pants fall under the taxi and so she takes off her boob tube to be able to better stretch under it.
The Killer then takes a hammer and a chisel and is about to strike the blade into the unwitting woman's anus, the attempts at suspense backfiring on account of some unconvincing impossible camera angles from what would have to be the brown-eye-view, before another woman unexpectedly shows up and asks if she can help.
The killer then strips her naked and glides his chisel across her body before stabbing her in the groin with it. Again what could be unbearable comes across as laughable, especially when he then drags her bloodless, seemingly unharmed form away. Taxi woman remains oblivious to all this, as she is still busy retrieving her hot pants from under the vehicle, then discovers the killer's accoutrements in the boot of the vehicle – too late...
A potentially worthwhile composition ruined by technical inability?
Episode 3:
Back in the station and the female attendant's girlfriend shows up, revealing that she only took on the post for bet. The two women return home and prepare for some lovemaking, at which point the Fantom shows up. He slits the girlfriend's throat - there are lashings of gore here, but the effect is negated by a blade that is more fake than the breast implants of the female performers - then deals with the attendant, who seems quite into their S&M games until she's handcuffed and helpless and he pulls her girlfriend's severed head out of his bag...
There's perhaps five minutes of decent spoof / parody material here, but as for the rest it's so calculated and as a result ineffectual in its attempts to shock. Perhaps it's desensitisation after years of watching what are by most people's standards pretty extreme films. I would prefer to think of it as a re-sensitisation, as to what a good giallo specifically or sex / horror hybrid generally can actually accomplish, however.
Pseudonyms galore; like Snuff, none of those who appeared in this film were ever heard from again...
Though purportedly of Polish origin – bottles of Bisongrass Vodka perform a function analogous to the beloved J&B bottle – the film would appear to in fact have been clandestinely produced in the UK with its director hiding behind a pseudonym. While probably a wise move legally – exactly what is the BBFC's policy on the insertion of wooden spoon and broom handles into the rectum, even if only implied? – and in terms of helping establish a certain mystique around the film, one really cannot emphasise enough that this is one of those films that would be better left to hopefully disappear. Sadly, however, with two sequels and an out-and-out hardcore porn offshoot, it would seem that too many of us were curious and / or believed the hype...
Tuesday, 19 June 2007
Midi Minuit Fantastique
Things have been quiet at http://bxzzines.blogspot.com for a while, but there's been a flurry of activity recently with some excellent scans from old magazines, like a Midi Minuit Fantastique piece on Riccardo Freda. Enjoy...
Monday, 18 June 2007
La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pyjama Girl Case
The body of a young woman is found on the beach, her face burned beyond recognition. The post-mortem reveals that she had been shot and bludgeoned. In addition to the official investigation, retired old-timer Inspector Timpson (Ray Milland) takes an interest in the case, which soon becomes an obsession.
The true face of horror
Deciding that before they can find the killer they must first identify the victim, the police have the body embalmed and put on public display. This seems to give them the break they need, leading to the arrest of a low-life by the name of Quint.
Timpson, however, is not convinced and goes to a rendezvous with the man he believes to be the real killer. The correctness of his deduction is confirmed by his own murder, compelling his ex-colleagues to re-open the case...
The macabre, Damien Hirst-like exhibition of the pyjama girl to the Sydney public
Luis Barboo in a cameo appearance as one of the audience; note the yellow of the perspex of the girls's glass cage
Though La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pyjama Girl Case / The Girl in the Yellow Pyjamas is the film certainly belongs within the form, as signalled by its self-referential title, hardly your typical giallo.
Drawing its inspiration from a notorious real-life murder case that shocked 1930s Australia (and which is examined in detail on the featurette on Blue Underground's excellent DVD) the film avoids the conventional trappings of black gloved killers, subjective stalk and slash camera and so on, favouring a low-key approach that's almost documentary like at times, most notably in its warts-and-all exploration of the demi-monde of Sydney's immigrant communities. (“Don't tell me you're jealous – Oh yes, you're Italian...”)
Michele Placido plays to the Italian stereotype
Stylised, but not too stylised?
It also throws the viewer expecting a conventional giallo for a loop through the device – only understood retrospectively – of introducing the pyjama girl to us in a parallel narrative, without revealing that it takes place in the past.
Indeed, thanks to the inclusion of a conventionally connoted vaseline-on-the-lens type dreamy “I remember” flashback in which she and her friend go to bed together, we could easily think that the latter is the victim and that what's about to develop is your standard psychosexual killer seeking to punish deviant women type affair.
What emerges is far more disturbing precisely on account of its banality, as we see how the “pyjama girl” (Dalila Di Lazarro) is deserted by her lover (Mel Ferrer), marries another (Michele Placido) on the rebound, embarks on an affair with a third (Howard Ross / Renato Rossini) and falls pregnant, en route to a denouement that's less premeditated murder than the inevitable accidental outcome of circumstances.
It's the kind of everyday tragedy that we find in neo-realism – the peasant girl mistaken for the GI's killer in Paisa and then shot as a Nazi collaborator, say – or in Pabst's Pandora's Box – the pyjama girl as a 1970s Lulu – of all-too-human characters rather than would-be supermen.
Equally, however, these two unlikely seeming reference points also point to one of the film's few weaknesses, perhaps stemming from director and co-writer Flavio Mogherini's background as a production designer.
It's that tension between simply showing the world out there and making more obvious interventions, of whether its enough in itself to show a factory floor to make a socio-political point or make it a more overtly expressionistic / symbolic unnatural landscape, or what the use of slow-motion and yellow lighting say as the pyjama girl ascends the stairs with the men to whom she has agreed to prostitute herself.
The giallo as exploitation and commentary on exploitation
Sometimes, as in both these instances, the ostensible gulf between objective and subjective is intersubjectively resolved in that poetic manner Mikel Koven distinguishes, although I would contend that there is also a greater degree of conscious artistry here than his thesis would seem to admit of. Elsewhere, however, as with the red and green lights that Mogherini likes to have play across the pyjama girl's face, it feels too self-conscious and contrived.
A case of Bava or Argento-itis
In a similar vein, if it seems impossible for directors to film in Sydney without including a scene or two in front of the opera house there are again potential subtexts: what does it represent, but a vision of the Australian dream; a dream only available to the disadvantaged and disenfranchised as an exterior to be taken in but not actually entered into.
As Troy Howarth pointed out, there are certain parallels between the film and Dario Argento's Sleepless, where Ulysses Moretti is also a retired ex-detective whose unofficial investigation is regarded with suspicion and / or derision by his younger counterparts, but ultimately leads to the solving of the case – albeit at the cost of his life as he gets too close to the truth. (“Times have changed. The modern delinquent's a different breed... don't take this to heart but age isn't on your side and God knows what you might run into in a case of this kind.”)
Yet beyond this Sleepless is the more traditional and conventional giallo through its cunning psychopath playing games with the police and extensive use of the subjective camera killers' eye-view set pieces, precisely because it represented an attempt by its director to “get back to basics” and give his core audience what they wanted / expected after the debacle of Phantom of the Opera.
Where Argento does seem to succeed, however, is in painting a more convincing picture of modern versus traditional police methods, insofar as here modern methods come down to old-fashioned brutality as a confession is forcibly extracted from Quint. Unless, of course, that's the point the film-makers were making here, of a sense of frustration creeping in as new technological and criminological approaches fail to deliver what they promise:
“I've got a theory. In my opinion the girl was raped before she was killed, obviously by some psychopath. Probably a man with a castration complex.”
Again, one comes down to that interpretive richness that makes the film so fascinating to review...
The alien geography of Sydney
Minor criticisms notwithstanding, The Pyjama Girl Case emerges as an impeccably mounted example of the filone as non-filone, the kind of giallo where the writing, direction, performances – Di Lazarro and Michele Placido are particularly outstanding as the ill-fated couple – and overall seriousness of tone, where the sleazy and salacious details always have that double edge to them, perhaps most eloquently expressed in the gallery sequence where the girl's body is exhibited like some perverse artwork before crowds of ambiguously motivated public spirited and / or ghoulish types, could appeal to wider audiences for whom the term “European cult cinema” is otherwise anathema.
A Bava-esque pieta?
The true face of horror
Deciding that before they can find the killer they must first identify the victim, the police have the body embalmed and put on public display. This seems to give them the break they need, leading to the arrest of a low-life by the name of Quint.
Timpson, however, is not convinced and goes to a rendezvous with the man he believes to be the real killer. The correctness of his deduction is confirmed by his own murder, compelling his ex-colleagues to re-open the case...
The macabre, Damien Hirst-like exhibition of the pyjama girl to the Sydney public
Luis Barboo in a cameo appearance as one of the audience; note the yellow of the perspex of the girls's glass cage
Though La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pyjama Girl Case / The Girl in the Yellow Pyjamas is the film certainly belongs within the form, as signalled by its self-referential title, hardly your typical giallo.
Drawing its inspiration from a notorious real-life murder case that shocked 1930s Australia (and which is examined in detail on the featurette on Blue Underground's excellent DVD) the film avoids the conventional trappings of black gloved killers, subjective stalk and slash camera and so on, favouring a low-key approach that's almost documentary like at times, most notably in its warts-and-all exploration of the demi-monde of Sydney's immigrant communities. (“Don't tell me you're jealous – Oh yes, you're Italian...”)
Michele Placido plays to the Italian stereotype
Stylised, but not too stylised?
It also throws the viewer expecting a conventional giallo for a loop through the device – only understood retrospectively – of introducing the pyjama girl to us in a parallel narrative, without revealing that it takes place in the past.
Indeed, thanks to the inclusion of a conventionally connoted vaseline-on-the-lens type dreamy “I remember” flashback in which she and her friend go to bed together, we could easily think that the latter is the victim and that what's about to develop is your standard psychosexual killer seeking to punish deviant women type affair.
What emerges is far more disturbing precisely on account of its banality, as we see how the “pyjama girl” (Dalila Di Lazarro) is deserted by her lover (Mel Ferrer), marries another (Michele Placido) on the rebound, embarks on an affair with a third (Howard Ross / Renato Rossini) and falls pregnant, en route to a denouement that's less premeditated murder than the inevitable accidental outcome of circumstances.
It's the kind of everyday tragedy that we find in neo-realism – the peasant girl mistaken for the GI's killer in Paisa and then shot as a Nazi collaborator, say – or in Pabst's Pandora's Box – the pyjama girl as a 1970s Lulu – of all-too-human characters rather than would-be supermen.
Equally, however, these two unlikely seeming reference points also point to one of the film's few weaknesses, perhaps stemming from director and co-writer Flavio Mogherini's background as a production designer.
It's that tension between simply showing the world out there and making more obvious interventions, of whether its enough in itself to show a factory floor to make a socio-political point or make it a more overtly expressionistic / symbolic unnatural landscape, or what the use of slow-motion and yellow lighting say as the pyjama girl ascends the stairs with the men to whom she has agreed to prostitute herself.
The giallo as exploitation and commentary on exploitation
Sometimes, as in both these instances, the ostensible gulf between objective and subjective is intersubjectively resolved in that poetic manner Mikel Koven distinguishes, although I would contend that there is also a greater degree of conscious artistry here than his thesis would seem to admit of. Elsewhere, however, as with the red and green lights that Mogherini likes to have play across the pyjama girl's face, it feels too self-conscious and contrived.
A case of Bava or Argento-itis
In a similar vein, if it seems impossible for directors to film in Sydney without including a scene or two in front of the opera house there are again potential subtexts: what does it represent, but a vision of the Australian dream; a dream only available to the disadvantaged and disenfranchised as an exterior to be taken in but not actually entered into.
As Troy Howarth pointed out, there are certain parallels between the film and Dario Argento's Sleepless, where Ulysses Moretti is also a retired ex-detective whose unofficial investigation is regarded with suspicion and / or derision by his younger counterparts, but ultimately leads to the solving of the case – albeit at the cost of his life as he gets too close to the truth. (“Times have changed. The modern delinquent's a different breed... don't take this to heart but age isn't on your side and God knows what you might run into in a case of this kind.”)
Yet beyond this Sleepless is the more traditional and conventional giallo through its cunning psychopath playing games with the police and extensive use of the subjective camera killers' eye-view set pieces, precisely because it represented an attempt by its director to “get back to basics” and give his core audience what they wanted / expected after the debacle of Phantom of the Opera.
Where Argento does seem to succeed, however, is in painting a more convincing picture of modern versus traditional police methods, insofar as here modern methods come down to old-fashioned brutality as a confession is forcibly extracted from Quint. Unless, of course, that's the point the film-makers were making here, of a sense of frustration creeping in as new technological and criminological approaches fail to deliver what they promise:
“I've got a theory. In my opinion the girl was raped before she was killed, obviously by some psychopath. Probably a man with a castration complex.”
Again, one comes down to that interpretive richness that makes the film so fascinating to review...
The alien geography of Sydney
Minor criticisms notwithstanding, The Pyjama Girl Case emerges as an impeccably mounted example of the filone as non-filone, the kind of giallo where the writing, direction, performances – Di Lazarro and Michele Placido are particularly outstanding as the ill-fated couple – and overall seriousness of tone, where the sleazy and salacious details always have that double edge to them, perhaps most eloquently expressed in the gallery sequence where the girl's body is exhibited like some perverse artwork before crowds of ambiguously motivated public spirited and / or ghoulish types, could appeal to wider audiences for whom the term “European cult cinema” is otherwise anathema.
A Bava-esque pieta?
Sunday, 17 June 2007
The Black Abbot
We begin with the obligatory pre-credits shock, as treasure hunter Mr Smooth (!) meets the titular abbot, with predictably fatal consequences. “Edgar Wallace” then introduces himself, followed by the assorted suspects, red herrings and plots that it is up to us and Scotland Yard, in the form of redoubtable Detective Puddler and his bumbling assistant Horatio W. Smith (Eddi Arent), to sift through.
First of all we have Lord Harry Chelford and his cousin Dick (Joachim Fuchsberger), representing the last of their line. Dick doesn't want Harry to marry, with all that implies in terms of an heir, and so tries to encourage Leslie Gine to break off her engagement to him.
Lawyer Gilder (Werner Peters) is also in love with Leslie, whose brother Arthur, an inveterate gambler, has forged Lord Chelford's signature on several documents that have come into Gilder's possession...
Chelford's butler, Fortuna (Klaus Kinski) is in Gilder's pay and keeps him abreast of developments at the abbey.
Mary Venner is the wild-card, seeking the treasure and / or a man to keep in her the style to which she would like to become more accustomed.
Finally there is the mysterious Dr Loxon, the Chelford family physician, and the small matter of the missing, presumed dead Lady Chelford, Harry's mother...
I revisited this 1963 krimi on the basis of having picked up the 1926 novel of the same name and wanting to see how faithful or otherwise an adaptation it was. The first main difference is the introduction of new characters, namely Mr Smooth, Dr Loxon and Horatio W. Smith, and some changes to those it includes. In the novel Dick is Harry's younger brother, while Mary has a more substantial role and displays more nous when, unwittingly given a contract signed in invisible ink she learns how to make it reappear. A second is the film's faster pace. In the novel the Abbot does not make an appearance until about a quarter of the way through and no-one is killed until midway through, so that the existence or otherwise of the Abbot and the treasure are initially in doubt. Likewise Puttler first appears as an essentially private investigator: while still from Scotland Yard, he's there in as a form of vacation. A third – and the one that really shows the film-makers' craft – is the way they have discarded the slightly more rarefied aspects of the mystery, where the location of the treasure is revealed to the reader through etymological clues (what is chesil?!) in favour of a more visually stylish, cinematic approach in which less talk and more action is the order of the day.
As with most krimi films The Black Abbot has that strange sense of temporal and cultural displacement stemming from being a 1960s German evocation of a 1920s England that was probably already half-mythical at the time of its creation. Yet it's these kitsch and camp aspects that are a large part of the appeal of the krimi to me, so it was pleasing to also find them in Wallace's novel. One cannot imagine something quite working in the same innocent way these days, however:
“You can come and sleep with me,” said Leslie. “I've got a big bed.” And this offer was most gratefully accepted.
“Have a look under your bed first,” said Miss Venner nervously, and not until this ritual had been observed did she commence very slowly to undress.”
Or how about the way Dick describes Harry:
“I am wholly responsible. I have always known my brother was queer, and about a year ago I was certain that the horrible taint of madness which his poor mother transmitted to him was developing in a way which could only have one end. I begged him to see a medical man, but he hated doctors. I brought down the best alienists from London in various guises...”
But for that Wallace almost certainly wasn't consciously thinking about it perhaps we could imagine a story entitled The Case of the Missing Gay Subtext...
First of all we have Lord Harry Chelford and his cousin Dick (Joachim Fuchsberger), representing the last of their line. Dick doesn't want Harry to marry, with all that implies in terms of an heir, and so tries to encourage Leslie Gine to break off her engagement to him.
Lawyer Gilder (Werner Peters) is also in love with Leslie, whose brother Arthur, an inveterate gambler, has forged Lord Chelford's signature on several documents that have come into Gilder's possession...
Chelford's butler, Fortuna (Klaus Kinski) is in Gilder's pay and keeps him abreast of developments at the abbey.
Mary Venner is the wild-card, seeking the treasure and / or a man to keep in her the style to which she would like to become more accustomed.
Finally there is the mysterious Dr Loxon, the Chelford family physician, and the small matter of the missing, presumed dead Lady Chelford, Harry's mother...
I revisited this 1963 krimi on the basis of having picked up the 1926 novel of the same name and wanting to see how faithful or otherwise an adaptation it was. The first main difference is the introduction of new characters, namely Mr Smooth, Dr Loxon and Horatio W. Smith, and some changes to those it includes. In the novel Dick is Harry's younger brother, while Mary has a more substantial role and displays more nous when, unwittingly given a contract signed in invisible ink she learns how to make it reappear. A second is the film's faster pace. In the novel the Abbot does not make an appearance until about a quarter of the way through and no-one is killed until midway through, so that the existence or otherwise of the Abbot and the treasure are initially in doubt. Likewise Puttler first appears as an essentially private investigator: while still from Scotland Yard, he's there in as a form of vacation. A third – and the one that really shows the film-makers' craft – is the way they have discarded the slightly more rarefied aspects of the mystery, where the location of the treasure is revealed to the reader through etymological clues (what is chesil?!) in favour of a more visually stylish, cinematic approach in which less talk and more action is the order of the day.
As with most krimi films The Black Abbot has that strange sense of temporal and cultural displacement stemming from being a 1960s German evocation of a 1920s England that was probably already half-mythical at the time of its creation. Yet it's these kitsch and camp aspects that are a large part of the appeal of the krimi to me, so it was pleasing to also find them in Wallace's novel. One cannot imagine something quite working in the same innocent way these days, however:
“You can come and sleep with me,” said Leslie. “I've got a big bed.” And this offer was most gratefully accepted.
“Have a look under your bed first,” said Miss Venner nervously, and not until this ritual had been observed did she commence very slowly to undress.”
Or how about the way Dick describes Harry:
“I am wholly responsible. I have always known my brother was queer, and about a year ago I was certain that the horrible taint of madness which his poor mother transmitted to him was developing in a way which could only have one end. I begged him to see a medical man, but he hated doctors. I brought down the best alienists from London in various guises...”
But for that Wallace almost certainly wasn't consciously thinking about it perhaps we could imagine a story entitled The Case of the Missing Gay Subtext...
Saturday, 16 June 2007
Another blog
Another Italian genre cinema blog for your enjoyment:
http://filmwalrus.blogspot.com/search/label/Italian%20Horror
http://filmwalrus.blogspot.com/search/label/Italian%20Horror
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