La sindrome di Stendhal

Argento has been cursed with a number of duds in recent years. 'Two Evil Eyes', 'The Phantom of the Opera', 'Sleepless', 'The Card Player' and one of the worst MASTERS OF HORROR episodes yet 'Jenifer'. However, the beautiful, poignant 'The Stendhal Syndrome' is an extremely well crafted rose between a number of poisonous thorns. It sees a return to the atmospheric dream-like charm of his earlier films like 'Phenomena' and 'Suspiria', but adopting his more recent sadism (it's always there, just a different style in his newer films) that gave slight high points in his otherwise dull modern films. After two poorly reviewed films ('Trauma' and 'Two Evil Eyes') Argento has finally done it right.

The film stars his daughter, Asia (whose interesting relationship with Dario adds to the intriguing and off-beat persona he puts out), as Anna, a beautiful police detective in Rome. When she is targeted by the serial killer she is hunting, she is raped and beaten and so leads Argento's best character study and one of the most intense of his films to date. Rather than following the madman as he offs prostitutes and impressionable young women through Italy (the film lightly touches on it, but the more left to the imagination the better), the film follows Anna as she loses grip on reality and develops a strange disease in which she can ever paintings in her mind and they help solve the case, called the Stendhal Syndrome. As the film goes on the attacks on Anna become more and more vicious, and the final climatic ending is one of Argento's best.

Asia delivers a interesting performance, to say it is good is to stretch the truth, but it is suited to the role and you can tell she has a lot of acting talent. All the other performances are rather flat, but as with all of Agento's films the performances aren't what really matter. The cinematography is bland, but as with Asia's performance suits the film better than if it were Technicolor. The tension and music is amazing, the film devotes itself to really unsettling you, rather than just entertaining you like other recent Argento's. 'The Stendhal Syndrome' is probably the most violent and disturbing I've seen the man go, the rape and murder scenes are gratuitously sadistic and the scenes where Anna is raped are bordering on exploitation.

Overall 'The Stendhal Syndrome' is a fantastic return to form fr Argento, and I hope 'The Third Mother' is anywhere near as well-crafted as this.

7/10

The Stendhal Syndrome is said to be a disorder where, upon viewing works of art, a person suffers from chills, anxiety attacks, and hallucinations where they believe they're actually in the paintings themselves. Don't ask me how real or common this disorder is since I'm not a doctor, but it sure makes for an interesting case study in Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome.

Anna Manni (Asia Argento) is an Italian police detective who goes to an art museum due to an phone tip from a woman claiming that she knows a serial rapist and murderer will be there. Once there, Anna suffers from an attack of Stendhal and ends up getting knocked out. When she comes to, a man is there and he follows her back to her room, rapes her, and kidnaps her, forcing her to watch him murder another victim. She flees from the scene, but the worst is yet to come.

It's hard to talk about this film without spoiling everything, but let's just say that the character of Anna goes through several transitions throughout the film. The 1st act of the film is pretty gripping and the 2nd act isn't terrible either, but by the 3rd act, you get the feeling like they don't know how to wrap this up so they're just stalling and making up stuff to distract us from the fact that the movie hasn't cleared for landing yet. By the end, you'll definitely be left scratching your head and wishing they'd have just ended it a half hour sooner.

Asia Argento isn't ideally suited for the role either and only seems to really come to life during the 2nd act where she adopts a touch, butch persona. She seems uncomfortable in the 1st and 3rd acts. There are also some questionable CGI effects throughout that take you out of the movie and it's not as stylish as many of Dario Argento's other works.

What makes up the singular pleasure that is Dario Argento? Maybe it's the crossroads where High Romanticism and hardcore porn meet. (I'm referring to the feeling of his work--not the images.) Argento seems doomed, like Peckinpah and like Lynch, to have summed up his world-view in a single masterpiece, the 1977 SUSPIRIA; the thrillers that came before and the low-budget shockers that came after may offer delights, but nothing close to that unity of vision.

Seeing THE STENDHAL SYNDROME projected in Los Angeles, I was struck with newfound sympathy for the Star Wars fans protesting way too much in favor of THE PHANTOM MENACE. If you love THE STENDHAL SYNDROME, you love Argento, and that is that--you may see the flaws, but they don't ruin your pleasure. The picture has too many Achilles heels to enumerate here, but what's important is that nobody in world cinema today is wrestling with his soul in the psychosexual mire the way Argento does. He puts his misogynistic demons and his almost sentimental compassion right out there; and only Cronenberg has such a direct pipeline to his own unconscious. Not to mention the fabulous, cascading images--Argento's stock-in-trade is Victorian Liebestod, Edward Gorey gone porno, and THE STENDHAL SYNDROME has sequences that rank with his best.

The sketchy thing about STENDHAL SYNDROME, like the maestro's TRAUMA, is his use of his daughter, Asia Argento, in scenes one cannot imagine a father watching, much less filming. Whatever memoirs come down the pike twenty years later, it must be said: Argento for certain lets it all hang out, and the land-mined terrain he maps is, to my taste, thrilling.

Regarded as one of Argento's lesser works, I find this one much more plausible than any of his early films. Let's face it, Argento doesn't care much about plot or even acting. His films are probably the frustrating I've ever seen: There are things I love, and things I hate about them. I grew up watching much of his films mutilated by Italian Television. I was a kid back then, and strangely enough his films never scared me when they were supposed to. They were really over the top. But I loved the colours, the pictures and once in a while I found myself humming Claudio Simonetti's electronic scores.

Now with this film Argento has Morricone, who is definitely a master and he does a great job here. Anna's character is really intriguing. Some people dismiss Asia's acting style, but I think it goes very well with her father's aesthetics. You wont find the crazy colours here. Everything is more restrained. The opening for example scene is great. But the film looses interest towards the end. Still I think is one of Argento's most solid pieces. The idea is truly interesting and Anna's relationship with the killer is fascinating. The hallucinations scenes of Anna going into the paintings are masterfully done.

After the huge disappointment of Il Cartaio, I hope he truly returns to form, and start doing what he's good at: Going crazy with film. La Sindrome Di Stendhal is a pretty good step.

I don't really understand why so many Argento fans dislike this film, I think it's one of his best works. It's not always easy to watch, it has some very nasty violence, even for an Argento film, I wouldn't recommend the film to sensitive persons; but it's not for exploitational purposes. Argento does a good job of juggling real-life horrors with a dreamy, hallucinatory atmosphere, and pulls off some typically Argento-esque setpieces, such as the one in which a bullet is followed through a woman's mouth with the aid of CGI. The great Ennio Morricone delivers possibly his best score for a horror film, the haunting main theme with his trademark wordless female vocals stayed with me long after the film was over. Frequent Fellini cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno does an excellent job on the film too.

The Stendhal Syndrome isn't for everyone, but it's worth a viewing for fans of European horror and psychological thrillers in general.