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A schoolgirl in Florence "witnesses" her mother stepping off the White Cliffs of Dover in the abstruse overture, a reprise of Don't Torture a Duckling's climax (complete with chunks of the plunging mannequin chipped off by jagged rocks) filtered like a memory of Vertigo. (Gabriele Ferzetti's resemblance to Olivier in Rebecca clinches the allusive approach.) The lass grows into a fur-swathed decorator (Jennifer O'Neill) but the hallucinations remain, a long drive through Boulez's tunnel uncorks an incriminatory tableau mort in her subconscious—shattered mirror, Visconti décor and dripping corpse are the elements, excavated via many, many zooms into the heroine's eyes. A murder out of the past, or a murder yet to happen? "Maybe you shouldn't have married a clairvoyant," she shrugs to her befuddled husband (Gianni Garko), but then his former lover's skeleton turns up in a dilapidated palazzo. "The normal sphere of sensitivity" and l'occulto are the poles, a tension not so much resolved as intensified by Lucio Fulci's severe gaze. Giallo feints cloak a contemplation of tainted art and deceived vision, one year ahead of Ruiz's Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting: Vermeer's The Love Letter, drained of color and scribbled over, is the anchoring icon amid glossy magazines and tinkling watches. Between Argento's crumbling wall and Lynch's crimson chamber, a certain kinship to De Palma's Obsession will be observed. It builds to a grand bit of Fulci suffocation with the aesthete's woozy POV during an entombment, a screen blacked out one brick at a time. (Poe inevitably figures in the punchline. "We're in Italy. It doesn't take much here.") With Marc Porel, Ida Galli, and Jenny Tamburi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |