La donna del lago

Having been very impressed by co-director Bazzoni's subsequent "The Fifth Cord", I have been very keen to see "The Lady of the Lake" since I first heard of it four or five years ago when i read Adrian Luther Smith's Excellent "Bloody and Black Lace" - a definitive collection of giallo reviews. It appears, under the title "The Possessed" in the obscure and rare titles section, along with a superlative review. Subsequent attempts to track the title down were in vain, until I popped into El Corte Ingles on my most recent Spanish holiday and found it on Filmax's "Giallo" collection under the title "El Mujer Del Lago". This is the only DVD outing I've ever heard of and there were both pros (a fantastic anamorphic print) and cons (it's Spanish and Italian only, with Spanish subs) - the cons apply as I'm an English speaker, but I was able to manage enough Spanish (with my dictionary at hand) to navigate through this beautiful, atmospheric film in Spanish with subs showing.

It's as good as it's advance word suggests - an ice cool, incredibly shot mood piece which emerges as a giallo only in hindsight, as at the time it was filmed, the concept hadn't been formed and we were still four years away from the giallo cycle proper which was initiated by the box office success of Argento's "The Bird with the Crystal Plummage" and Martino's "The Case of the Scorpion's Tail" amongst others.

The plot: A writer returns to the small town where he had vacationed previously. he's keen to meet up with his former maid, Tilde, with whom he had enjoyed a romance previously. However, she isn't there and the locals are not keen on talking about why. As he goes through the town, casual encounters build up an atmosphere of menace as everyone seems to be brushing her untimely death under the carpet. The writer presses on in his investigations, seeking the facts behind her death and finding an awful lot of problems lying beneath the town's impassive surface, but in doing so unleashes the pitch black heart of darkness that lies within this film's conclusion.

In terms of style, this is far away from the post-Argento iconography of the giallo. There are no black leather gloved killers here, no stalk and slash killings. All of the (physical) violence occurs off camera. But this remains one of the most claustrophobic, oppressive films of it's time. Much of the drama unfolds within the walls of the hotel, with flashbacks, fantasies and the present unfolding in this space. The film it feels most like is Renais' "Last year At marienbad", but with a more defined narrative. I suspect a lot of the time shifts come from co-screenwriter Gulio Questi, who would later return to the editing styles shown here in his own films such as "Django Kill... If you live, shoot!". Bazzoni contributes his unnerving eye for architecture as counterpoint and subtext to the story (he's on a par with Michael Mann in this respect).

This is a film about love, all types of love, from the casual to the obsessive, and the film gradually cranks up the tension until the conclusion. I hope that a wider audience will be able to embrance this with a DVD release from an outfit such as No Shame or Blue Underground. In the meantime, I'd advise anyone who cares about atmospheric horror/ thriller cinema to pick up the Spanish release, which can be had for a remarkable price (I paid €8.95).

The famous writer Bernard (Peter Baldwin) travels to a small town nearby a lake to spend vacation out of season in the winter. He check in an old hotel owned by Enrico (Salvo Randone) and his daughter Irma (Valentina Cortese) expecting to meet the maid Tilde (Virna Lisi), from whom he had a crush last time he visited the town. However, he discovers that Tilde has committed suicide and when he meets the local photographer (Piero Anchisi), Bernard learns that she was pregnant. He becomes obsessed to find whether she really committed suicide and to guess what really happened. When Enrico's son Mario (Philippe Leroy) and his wife Adriana (Pia Lindstrom) arrive at the hotel, Bernard has daydreams about the fate of Tilde.

"La donna del lago", a.k.a. "The Lady of the Lake", is a dark and mysterious Italian film with a simple and inconclusive story. The black and white cinematography is magnificent, with great use of lighting and shadows. The cast is also excellent, supported by an intriguing screenplay with great narrative. Bernard's daydreams are interesting, showing what he is thinking and changing his reality many times. "La donna del lago" is for specific audiences that will certainly enjoy this type of story. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Mulher do Lago" ("The Lady of the Lake")

The Lady in the Lake is often seen as a precursor to the Giallo style that would reach it's peak in the early seventies; and I can certainly see why. However, I would say that the film is closer to a supernatural mystery film than a Giallo and it also shares a lot in common with the popular American film noir style; stemming from it's picture, execution and subject material. The film is very much of the high quality variety and director Luigi Bazzoni takes time and a lot of care to ensure that the film is haunting and mysterious as possible - which pays dividends as the plot starts to pan out. We focus on Bernard; a writer who goes to spend some time in a dilapidated hotel where he spent some time the previous year. Once he gets there, he begins searching for Tilde; a young maid he fell in love with during his previous visit, but he's surprised by the news that Tilde killed herself. However, it would appear that there is more to the apparent suicide as Bernard is shown a picture suggesting she was pregnant...

The film is directed by Luigi Bazzoni, who go on to make one of the best seventies Giallo's with the excellent The Fifth Cord as well as one of the oddest genre films with Footsteps in 1975. There's also a writer's credit for Death Laid an Egg writer-director Giulio Questi, so rather unsurprisingly - The Lady of the Lake is a rather bizarre film! It starts off simple enough and the first half of the movie is pretty easy viewing, but then things start to get a bit stranger in the second half and it becomes easy to loose the plot. It's lucky then that there's more than enough to keep the audience otherwise entertained. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous and the black and white picture allows the director to capture a real macabre and moody atmosphere. The town in which the film takes place is a masterpiece within itself - the ghostly local population in particular is memorable. The plot comes back together towards the end and the film does give closure to its central plot line. Overall, The Lady of the Lake will probably not please all viewers; but it's a very well made mystery and anyone that considers themselves a fan of Italian cinema should check it out!

Some people consider this a proto-giallo. It kind of is, in the same way The Girl Who Knew Too Much resembles a giallo, actually it's a 'woman gone missing' mystery shot in black and white where a lot of the usual giallo tropes are absent for the simple reason they had not been mapped down yet; the same movie made ten years later would have probably been shot in garish Technicolor, the murders would take place on screen and we'd be treated to the black-gloved hand of the murderer. A lot of common giallo themes can be found here though, sexual obsession, distorted memory, a chain of events is unlocked when a character visits a place of his past, the boundaries between reality and fantasy/madness blurred by something that may or may not be a product of the mind, yet I'd place the movie closer to the psychological horror Polanski was yet to do than Mario Bava, or a movie that would influence the gialli of Sergio Martino more than those of Dario Argento.

If you take it apart to study the parts it was made of, you'll find a lot of familiar ideas reconfigured together in similar ways in other movies. This is the type of movie where a fiction writer (who is "dead inside" by his own admission) arrives at a remote town by a lake to look for a girl who presumably committed suicide a year ago, the town streets are empty and there's talk of a family harboring a "terrible secret", the writer stays at an old hotel where according to the suave-creepy owner "he's the only resident" because it's off-season, at some point a photo of the dead woman is presented that throws a new light into the situation, and there's a mysterious slaughterhouse behind the hotel that looks like the abandoned warehouse Nosferatu hauls his coffin to in Murnau's 1922 film.

The movie does a lot of something I find annoying: a scene where people behave in odd ways or has a certain kind of offbeat atmosphere plays out and then we cut to a shot of the writer jolted awake in his bed back at the hotel. Bazzoni is a little too quick to point out "DREAM SCENE!!" to his audience, a little too quick to reassure the viewer that "this part that didn't make sense wasn't really supposed to" so that as the movie begins to morph into something else we're lulled back to the safe environment of the genre picture, where the protagonist can narrate his thoughts in voice-over and where 'dream scene' appears to be the director's way of saying "I want to shoot with the whites washed out".

But even that is not what it seems, because at some point we get the flashback of a memory of something that happened in one of the writer's previous stays in the hotel, the writer walks up the stairs and spies on a love scene between the dead woman and a man he can't identify, and we get extreme closeup shots of an eye watching this through a keyhole. Later this memory is expanded upon in the writer's mind and what we saw at first suddenly takes new meaning so that the love scene may had not been a love scene and the victim may had not been the victim after all, but it doesn't become clear whether this is a repressed memory unlocked by circumstance or a wish fulfillment dream, the writer furnishing a twisty conclusion worthy of one of his pulpy books to an incident that remains unexplained and ambiguous like most real life situations usually are. Fittingly this new twist feels very film noir, deceit and greed is involved and for a moment the moral universe of the film is turned on its head.

This is what I take from the Lady of the Lake, like the blurry photo that is only a magnified detail of a larger frame, the sense of mystery partially revealed to us for a moment then withdrawn from our eyes again. Now the mystery is ours, literally to inhabit the memory. Or better yet, there's a strange melancholy woman in a white coat who walks by the beachwalk every night by herself and we watch her stroll under the lamp posts from the window of our hotel room. One morning she's found dead and if only we'd have gone down there to talk to her while there was still time.

Near the end the movie shifts from eye-level Shining track shots of hotel corridors to vertical shots of the protagonist going down a spiral staircase, the whole geography is now inverted, and we're invited inside the mysterious slaughterhouse for the big reveal. There we get portrait shots steeped in shadow and claw-like hands emerging in silhouette from behind a white glass panel. It's all a bit like we're seeing the seedy industrial locations of Tetsuo through the wintry viewfinder of Sven Nykvyst, or like fetish filmmaker Maria Beatty had brought her inky blacks to the glowy diffused whites of Funeral Parade of Roses.

For the end the movie feels the need to explain itself and provide a definitive conclusion, with the villain recounting the whodunit details to the protagonist, and then in very melodramatic fashion a crazed woman is running down the beach, arms flailing wildly. The Italo-horror fan will savour the whole thing start to finish, but there's enough surreal oddity here to make even the Last Year at Marienbad crowd sit down and take notice.

I saw this on late-night local TV in the early 70s, tolerably dubbed, under the title LOVE, HATE AND DISHONOR, and was immediately taken by it's eerie, VAMPYRE-like style.

It never played on TV again, and in the late 70s to 90s I searched for it in vain. I did catch a reference to it under the title Possessed in the Encyclpedia of Horror Movies.

Finally found a poor quality English-subtitled VHS a few years back from VideoSearch of Miami and enjoyed it once again. I guess I have to add two more lines of text to meet the minimum requirement to post. I hope this is enough