La controfigura

As a fan of gialli, I had high hopes for this one. It has a solid cast. Jean Sorel is in some of the better ones, including 'The Short Night of Glass Dolls' and 'Lizard in a Woman's Skin.' It's got an intriguing Hitchcock-esque title. Who is 'The Double'? Sadly, 'La Controfigura' just lacks the smart twists and turns of a great mystery thriller. It's not enough about who killed whom and is too much about who's doing whom.

The film starts strong, with a man being shot in a carpark. Why did it happen? Who shot him? Will he survive? Unfortunately, the next hour and a half won't shed much light on that subject. Instead, you'll spend a holiday in a really weird setting with our protagonist, who manages to make every situation weird and awkward. He's constantly jealous of his new wife while simultaneously trying to get it on with other women, and in the wrongest, most cringey ways possible.

So about three quarters of the way through the soap opera, you're probably wondering, 'what happened to our great mystery'? Well, eventually all is revealed, of course, but what did it have to do with anything else in the film? God knows. The story includes diplomats and physicists and bad guys asking, 'Where is it?', yet they're all tossed aside as useful plot points, not even used as red herrings.

'La Controfigura' is not a totally unwatchable film. The actors are decent and good looking, the locations are nice, there's some drama and intrigue. It's just that the soap opera is pretty disconnected from the actual mystery. The puzzle is missing some pieces that could have at least formed a picture.

I can only be honest and make it absolutely clear: I find Ewa Aulin completely cute and stunning to look at. Even the voice dubbed on top of hers doesn't compromise that. Jean Sorel as Giovanni, whose recollections make up the bulk of this film, is a classically good looking gentleman. As a couple, however, Giovanni and Lucia share a tempestuous, jealous relationship. And that is what takes up most of the plot.

Despite the appealing quality of these two performers, their various dalliances aren't quite as interesting to watch as the writers seem to think, although Romolo Guerrieri's direction lifts it into a somewhat dream-like state. But the various liaisons are virtually all that happens. The main thrust of interest involves how Giovanni ends up in the predicament he's enduring when we first encounter him at the beginning of the film.

Despite the wafer-thin plot, this is as breezy, if undemanding, entry into the giallo genre - mainly because of the appeal of the two main players. My score is 5 out of 10.

Poor Jean Sorel. He heads down to an underground car park to innocently park his car and some mysterious guy shoots him. As he hits the ground, instead of his life flashing before his eyes, an entire giallo film does instead, and not just the flashbacks of stuff that actually happened – this flashback contains his fantasies too!

You see Jean is a young(ish) businessman working for his father in Morocco, although mooching off him while his brother (Giacomo Rossi- Stuart) does all the hard work might be a better description. When we first meet Jean he's frolicking around the beach with his new wife Lucia (including some underwater noodling – that's one detailed flashback!). Lucia seems to be interested in a local hippy type who's wandering around the beach, which Jean isn't too happy with. He also keeps hallucinating that he's with another lady, which confused the hell out of me at first.

This other lady is Lucia's mum, and although Jean gets jealous of Lucia talking to the hippy (Eddie, his name is), he doesn't mind trying it on with her mum or becoming completely obsessed by her, and it doesn't help that she's hooked up with Eddie. This leads to Jean fantasising about shooting Eddie in the face with a rifle, which is a strange thing to have a flashback about.

Things jump between Rome and Morocco while Jean flirts with Lucia's mum, argues with Lucia, discusses the 'hippy movement' on a yacht and such like. It's all kind of trippy and disjointed and although it's quite different from your usual giallo madness, there's not enough of the usual giallo madness here. Although the ending was pretty daft.

Jean Sorel seems to have moved away from the Giallo genre following this and Short Night of the Glass Dolls – he was quite good though.

First I must confess that I'm not a big fan of gialli. I've seen enough of them to know that they almost invariably play gleefully on the audience's prurient and senselessly violent impulses, and, to boot, a good percentage of them are inept in the filmmaking department. There usually isn't much of interest for someone looking for quality cinema. THE DOUBLE is one of the exceptions.

The film shares its flashback structure with Claude Sautet's poignant French drama LE CHOSES DE LA VIE. In addition, "The Double" would be a very fitting companion piece to Aldo Lado's MALASTRANA, a giallo which it closely resembles, and which also stars Jean Sorel.

Frank (Sorel) is an indolent playboy living off proceeds from his father's business. As the film begins, Frank drives his Citroen into a Rome parking garage and is shot by a mysterious bearded man. The remainder of the story is a series of flashbacks, as the dying Frank recollects how he arrived at his present circumstance: Frank was married to the lovely but dimwitted Lucia(Ewa Aulin), but secretly pined after her mirror-image, more sophisticated mother Nora(Lucia Bose). When Nora became involved with an American drifter, Eddie(Sergio Doria), Frank was green with envy. Things spiral out of control....but not as one would expect. By the climax, the moral comes into focus: Keeping one's passions unchecked can lead to ruin. Not exactly a new notion, but it's intriguingly explored here.

"The Double" is not without its flaws. The (customarily, for an Italian film) incongruous folk music and the anything-goes attitude towards sex and lounging about are badly dated; early sections of the film are languorous and convoluted; the final scene is not quite clear, at least in the version I saw. I would love to see a subtitled incarnation of the film, as dubbing is oft disconcerting and poorly recorded.

Director Romolo Guerrieri is the real star of the proceedings. His commanding style and aplomb with the intercutting is impressive. There are countless striking visual flourishes throughout.

Very slow giallo which spreads the states of mind of the idle architect Giovanni (Jean Sorel, Il dolce corpo di Deborah from the same director), who lives at the expense of his industrial brother (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Sette scialli di seta gialla), and fails to gladden his young wife Lucia (Ewa Aulin, Col cuore in gola), whom he prefers deceiving with his glamour mother-in-law (Lucia Bosè, Le Testament d'Orphée). Pushed by his jealousy towards a charming and hippie American reader of Mao and Malcolm X (Sergio Doria, L'Iguana dalla lingua di fuoco), who happens to be gay, and furthermore stuck in a revolted mood which only turns into plain conformism, Giovanni commits himself in a spiral of self-destruction.

But let's begin by the end as does the movie: Giovanni is shot to death in an underground parking by a bearded killer (Antonio Pierfederici, La maschera del demonio), and in the very next scene he is naked and happy with is wife on a North African beach. For the whole film is made of flashback episodes revealing step by step the way which has lead to his murder. If the plot thus constantly looks backward to paint the events, so seems to do the film itself built as an old fashioned first timer psychological giallo, while the style has frankly already gone towards other directions. Whilst the whole cast seems to enjoy their quite everlasting holidays under the sun, the hero can conclude disenchanted: «In that case it was all done for nothing».