Dir: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, France/Belgium, 2009, 90 mins, French with English subtitles
Cast: Cassandra Forêt, Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud, Marie Bos
Review by Dave Hall
This is a pastiche of the giallo style of film making, developed by Italian directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento in the 60s and 70s, partly in response to the output of Hammer and Roger Corman’s celebrated Poe adaptations. The gialli combined murder mystery plots with elements of horror and eroticism, but their main characteristics were an impressionistic visual style, self-consciously theatrical setups, and often discordant or inappropriate music.
Cattet and Forzani have definitely studied their sources: this gets pretty close to replicating what it must have been like to see one of the giallo films during their heyday. There’s barely any story in the conventional sense, instead we get three key passages, moments almost, in the life of main protagonist Ana. First we see her as a child (Forêt) stealing a locket from a prune-faced corpse and then witnessing her parents making love. Next, she’s an adolescent (Guibeaud), caught between childhood and maturity, easily able to taunt a football-playing boy in the street, but flirting with a more dangerous game when she teases a gang of motorcycling youths. And finally she returns to her childhood home to confront her demons as well as a leather-gloved, razor-wielding killer.
You don’t need to know your Freud from your Jung to get something out of this, but it might help. Fantasy and reality are blurred, waking states and nightmares confused, sexual repression cosies up to ecstatic abandon and even life and death aren’t mutually exclusive. Do Cattet and Forzani have any more clue what’s going on than the audience, or are they inviting answers on a postcard? What’s indisputable is that they’ve come up with a gorgeous-looking film, with one stunning visual composition following on from another. Their camera gets up close and personal with everything that happens, whether it’s an ant crawling up the thigh of the adolescent Ana, or a razor drawing across a bare patch of skin. The result, as so often in giallo, is that everything is fetishised and given an erotic charge: leather and lace, chrome and steel, sex and death.
Your tolerance for all this may depend on your need for a little exposition and even some dialogue with your thrillers, and those with a heightened sense of the ridiculous may be stifling more than a few giggles. But if you’re looking to lose yourself in sumptuous cinematic style, and have a thing for kinky representations of disturbed psychological states you’re in for a treat. The whole confection is smothered in the rich caramel sauce of an impossibly lush soundtrack that draws on contributions from Ennio Morricone and giallo veteran Bruno Nicolai.
The sensory overload is so great with this one you may find yourself discharging static as you leave the cinema.
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