Tortura de um Pesadelo

I thought that this was a brilliant thriller. Hemmings's character is the perfect foil, an admitted addict. He is like a mute who cannot scream at the horror enveloping him. Paranoia and fecklessness bounce off a genuine conspiracy. The tension is almost unbearable.

Ex-junkie author David Hemmings (Tim) is chilling out in Italy and agrees to meet his aunt Flora Robson (Lucy) for lunch in Pompeii. I'm afraid that's not going to happen – Robson doesn't make it. She's been strangled. Hemmings wants to find out more about her aunt's life and pursues his own investigation back in London. However, there is a network called 'The Stepping Stones' that seems hell-bent on preventing him from discovering anything. He's a marked man unless he drops his curiosity.

It's a tense film if a little complicated at times as you're never quite sure who's who. Basically, suspect everyone who Hemmings comes into contact with. The cast are good and the story unravels well but the ending just didn't do it for me. I wanted something better as things don't get resolved in the manner I had wanted. And the music by Johnny Harris is laughably inappropriate. I see that some nutter has previously referred to it as a superb music score. He clearly has no knowledge of how to score a film. The film leaves unanswered questions and that was a let-down for me.

I speak not of the story itself but the overall atmosphere, and the presence of David Hemmings is of course not totally a coincidence. Remember that the Antonioni's film, his best known, was also starring David Hemmings. Richard Sarafian gives here one of his less known films, and it doesn't deserve such a treatment. In this movie, many details, things may be illusion, they are not necessarily what they seem to be, as in BLOW UP, that's my analysis. It is an intriguing, a bit disturbing mystery tale that grabs you more and more to the extent the movie proceeds. The ending is of course really weird, but I guess that belongs to the overall spirit, mind of this interesting thriller which may let you think of a British giallo. The early seventies was the perfect period for giallos.

It's a shame that while Fragment seems to be a latent classic, what frustrates is Hemmings' rather offbeat performance early on, rather at odds with the style and ambiance of the film. Also, the plot seems to be missing elements which were either cut, not filmed or deliberately left out to add to the jumbled nature of Tim's disintegration. What is left is a paradigm of paranoid perfection with Tim's existential fate rendered powerless in the face of the crises his alternate path's absence creates. His brain develops as many holes as he may have put in his arms, and he eventually disappears down a rabbit hole part Hitchcock, part Kubrick, part Antonioni. The supporting cast are all exceptional with such household faces as Daniel Massey, Kenneth Cranham, Arthur Lowe and Philip Stone. Director Safarian was subsequently to make his best film Vanishing Point, placing Fragment as the nearly man in the careers of practically everyone involved. If you enjoy your movies off centre and with a focus on style over substance, without paying consideration to tedious concerns like comprehensibility then you will find much to like here.

I felt this could have been so much better and began to temporarily tire of it somewhere around the halfway mark and then it lifted and ran pretty well to the end. David Hemmings seemed a bit limp and Gayle Hunnicutt almost asleep but then maybe it was the erratic script. I guess there is also the problem where a film is going to have different levels of reality that not all can be made too transparently clear. There is a wonderful cameo from Wilfred Hyde-White and things certainly pick up with the appearance of Daniel Massey and Arthur Lowe. Apart from the dialogue being rather lacklustre at times and some scenes going on a tad too long, the music is completely wrong. I have seen the score by Johnny Harris highly praised and possibly outside of the film the jazzy music is fine but here it is too loud, too obvious and basically, bloody annoying. Despite all this, the film remains likable enough and certainly worth a look.