The Possessed

True
Crime
Dreaming

The Possessed
aka La donna del lago
aka The Lady Of The Lake
Italy 1965
Directed by
Luigi Bazzoni & Franco Rossellini
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

This is a first time watch for me for this early giallo, made just two years after Mario Bava’s first two cracks at the genre, The Girl Who Knew Too Much (reviewed by me here) and Blood And Black Lace (reviewed here). The film is co-directed by Luigi Bazzoni who also went on to co-direct the brilliant Footprints On The Moon (reviewed by me quite a while ago here) and this one has exactly the same kind of bizarre and surreal qualities to it. Both those films deal with an outsider who travels to a town for something and ends up trying to solve a puzzle which may or may not be inexorably linked to themselves in the process.

In this case, that main protagonist is Bernard, a novelist played by Peter Baldwin who we hear, via his telephone call from a phone booth at the start, is in the act of leaving his girlfriend to go be with his new woman. After the credits have run their course we discover, when he checks into his favourite hotel in the unnamed town that he stayed in the year before, that his hopes for a more solid relationship were  a little premature. The girl, Tilde, played by Virna Lisi, is dead and it’s been officially pronounced a suicide. She was a maid working in the hotel and Bernard obviously had a past experience with her. Also in the film... and of note... are the hotel owner Enrico (Salvo Randone), his daughter Irma, who is another maid (Valentina Cortese), his son Mario (Philippe Leroy) and Mario’s new wife Adriana (Pia Lindström).

However, a local photographer played by Pier Giovanni Anchisi suggests there is more to the story than just that and that she was a) pregnant with someone’s child and b) had her throat cut. So the, frankly unstable and unreliable Bernard, who is telling the audience what is going on (kind of) in a voice over narrative style, decides to try and investigate the death himself. He also catches flu at some point but his fever dreams seem no different in quality from all the other dreams he is having.

Okay, so I’m not saying any more about the narrative but I will say that the film has a totally dreamy and unusual atmosphere which, throughout the movie, kept reminding me of both Footprints On The Moon and another film I have a strange relationship with, Last Year In Marienbad. This is because, in the way the film is shot, we have a lot of sequences which could be memories or could be dreams and, due to the way it’s all edited, there’s no indication as to if these are real things, made up things or indeed, the actual ‘real’ narrative which is taking place. Sometimes a sequence will tell you something which didn’t actually happen and sometimes you will not even realise you’re in a dream, nor indeed a flashback. Sometimes it becomes obvious and the director will show Bernard waking from a dream state and, sometimes it’s much less obvious and almost imperceptible from various parallel sequences running throughout the film’s running time.

If this sounds fragmented or disjointed well... yeah, okay it kind of is... but it’s also a fascinating exploration of narrative strands colliding that really seems to work for some directors (almost a little more like a less clearly demarked stylistic cousin to Fellini’s Eight And A Half in some ways). It’s also shot with absolutely crisp, high contrast black and white cinematography with the director using the verticals and angles of interior locations like the hotel to their utmost. The film truly is beautiful to look at, like a less coherent but quite addictive version of something Mario Bava might do in monochrome.

Also, wow. It’s too bad the score by Renzo Rossellini has never seen the light of day on a soundtrack release of any kind. It’s absolutely fantastic and, since there are a lot of longish sequences (which may or may not be a dream or flashback) where there’s no dialogue, it has a chance to really breathe some life into the film. Indeed, some of the sequences which would not be all that sinister without the score, are given a kind of escalating tension that becomes almost unbearable and adds a heck of a lot of power to some of those sequences. It’s a real shame there’s no CD issue of this thing.

Oh, one last thing which I should probably point out, since I’ve been comparing it to more abstract works like Last Year In Marienbad, is that the film is based on a literary novel by Giovanni Comisso which in itself is a version of a real murder case, which happened sometime in the 1930s. And yes, despite the dream-like atmosphere which permeates the whole movie, you will at least get both a solution to the puzzle and the series of murders which escalates a little towards the end of the movie. Unlike Marienbad and others of that ilk, there’s a much more solid ending even if, by the end of the movie, there’s one person almost but no quite accounted for, before the credits role. That’s okay though... The Possessed (and English language title which I totally fail to understand in the context of the movie I just watched) is a really cool film and I will definitely be revisiting this a number of times in the future, for sure. Definitely give this one a go.