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To create spectators, "the artist's fondest dream" according to Nabokov, if it takes pins to prop the eyes open then so be it, says Dario Argento. Bacon's 42nd Street has the joke, the wounded diva makes way for the understudy (Cristina Marsillach), the cursed debut is Verdi's Macbeth. She becomes a star but also the target of a maniac, who forces her to witness his butchery: "You're just gonna have to watch everything." Agent (Daria Nicolodi), stage manager (William McNamara), police inspector (Urbano Barberini) and seamstress (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni), everybody's a suspect until they're a casualty. Then there's the director (Ian Charleson), a splatter maven turned stage avant-gardist facing corpses as well as reviews. "Go back to horror movies, forget opera." The grand summation of Argento's themes reaching back to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, with an extraordinary floating camera to embody the gruesome liquidity of the stare. The black leather glove on the crimson velvet balcony, the blood-splattered binoculars and the blade tapping the pixelated monitor. (The main competition is with Bertolucci's Luna.) Poe's raven, an entire murder of them, a vindictive avian iris. The tell-tale bracelet slips down a woman's throat in the costume room, shears are at hand for an impromptu vivisection. Ocular spirals throughout, from the opening POV shot to the peephole of a door, eventually the pupil absorbs a flaming bullet. "My God, look what success has done to you!" A sustained bravura blurs coup de théâtre and coup de cinéma, the rotating overhead shot of the opera house virtually throws Visconti's Senso into a blender. The coda trades tenebrous chambers for Alpine greens only to splash them with red, the heroine at last in her own magical-macabre garden. "Depends on what you call reality." Cinematography by Ronnie Taylor. With Antonella Vitale, Barbara Cupisti, and Michele Soavi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |