Chricke-2

My father, who has never been a fan of domestic cinema, always used to keep a skeptic and indifferent moaning attitude towards the Swedish films of this sort when aired on telly. When this particular gem was shown, however, during one of its many awkwardly staged sceneries, the sofa began to shake. I was something like twelve years old, and I grasped nada of this flick but thinking it was high intellectual stuff, I turned to my dad wondering what was happening. It appeared he was laughing so hard he could barely make a sound. I learned something by this, realizing that a highly pitched intellectual tone in a film not necessarily means it has qualities, nor artistically nor as a commentary of the human condition. I realized fully the meaning of pretentiousness. Thus was the state of Swedish films in the late 1970s, technically inadequate (maybe audible sound and intelligible dialog were deemed to prosaic to be considered in serious film-making), far-fetched Freudinism interpreted individually be those granted Swedish governmental funding, and utterly unwatchable today. No wonder Ingmar Bergman our escaped country in 1976.

Watch it and You realize what the summary of this comment refers to...

This is the first Argento movie I have seen. I've seen a lot of movies and thought I more or less marked out which genres and which cinematic approaches I was most fascinated by. Than all of a sudden one comes across something new, entirely new way of putting together the various components of filming techniques, that when otherwise used, too often become jaded clichés into something different. A true art experience. When the initial credits appear and the music starts You think You enter known and marked territory, with all the familiar clichés. As a film buff I am familiar with the Italian tradition of blending the nationality of their film cast so that every other actor need be dubbed, to me that's nothing new, however, the characters here are not international per se, they are a strange cocktail of very stylised but absurd personalities. The women are over stylized, made up un-contemporarily to become 40s film noir zombies in a 1970s Rome. They appear almost surreal and over-the-top stylised, almost like transvestites. This creates a peculiar atmosphere which slowly enhances the tension and viewer experience. Let me say this; I have never ever seen such a character like the one portrayed by Miss Nicolodi, neither on screen nor in reality. She is NOT our beloved Italian film sirene, no Loren, no Cardianale, no Monica Vitti, not by any means sexy as humans perceive it. She comes out as a cross between Carmen Miranda and Myrna Loy (the director has struggled to make her come out like a battle-of-the-sexes comedienne from 1940s). Her gestures with her hand is purely a self-developed style, alienated from any acting, her body moves live an entirely different time-space than her character and the rest of the film, and the rest of the universe. First I was flabbergasted, it distracted me from the plot, I couldn't decide whether this was genius or miscalculation and artistic failure to make her appear like this. Still it started to haunt me, and I was beginning to develop a fascination for this extraterrestrial character. She is the scariest thing I have ever seen on screen, and one of the most fascinating, because her character is obviously an extension of the artistic message the director wants to communicate. It is too elaborate to be coincidence; he appears to force not only her, but all his female characters in the film into a 1940s good girl movie babes or glamour queens. Speaking of blending, the settings of this film are a mixture of Latin-Roman and Gothic; we as spectators are presented into Hitchcockian environments, but set in the Roman campagna and Roman inner city. Even an Italian bourgeoisie villa, when abandoned and haunted by ghost, is as scary as the Anglo-Saxon Victorian hell nest. The steaming bathroom scene doesn't lack anything in cinematic poignancy as that of Hitchcooks Phsycho. The statuesque barflies in the 1940s cafe (familiarto a famous American artist whose name I forgot) reside just outside Hemings VERY stylised apartment. Can You be more inn and dolce vita than an English jazz pianist university teacher in Rome living in palazzo-like building with Bavarian physics as neighbours? And to top it all, the score, also at first annoying and misplaced, the Goblins, who are they? An Itialian Tolkien blues band with Led Zeppelin influences? OK, very good indeed, but as a score to a Gothic thriller, NO, and yet it starts to work after an hour of viewing. I know already I am going to watch this movie again and again, since I have been lucky to discovered yet another cinematic universe, the GIALLO thriller.