The Stendhal Syndrome

The Prisoner
Of Stendhal

The Stendhal Syndrome
aka La sindrome di Stendhal
Directed by Dario Argento
Italy 1996 Medusa
BFI Screening NFT 3
Sunday 8th May 2023

Warning: Yeah, it’s an oldish film and to talk about certain interesting aspects of it requires a big spoiler... so don’t read this if you’ve not seen it before.

So, after three years of lapsed subscription brought on by the Coronavirus pandemic, I finally renewed my BFI membership (the first and only time I’ve let it lapse since the mid-1980s). If I’d known that the BFI were doing a season of films by my favourite director, Akira Kurosawa, earlier in the year then I maybe would have done it sooner (although the tickets are still expensive, even with a member’s discount). However, one of my other favourite directors, Dario Argento, is the subject of a season in May and so I picked two films which, although I’ve seen them before, I don’t think I’ve seen on a big screen before (but my memory is a bit hazy on which I’ve seen in a cinema and which ones I haven’t, truth be told).

For some reason the season seems to be marketed as some kind of ‘horror’ season, so maybe the BFI dropped the ball a little there because, from memory, Argento only ever made a few horror films with almost all the rest of his output belonging exclusively to the giallo genre. And if you are confusing horror for the cinematic variant of giallo then, yeah, I think you definitely haven’t seen enough gialli to realise there’s a huge difference. The other bad thing I noted was that the season is subtitled Doors Into Darkness. Why, then, would the BFI choose to not show any of the TV episodes (at least the one he directed) of the Dario Argento presented 1970s TV series of that very same name? Seems a bit odd, to say the least.

Okay, onto the film. I’ve not watched The Stendhal Syndrome in at least two decades, possibly more. I remember at the time there was a lot of buzz around the violence of the movie and how Dario could have put his lead actress, his daughter Asia Argento, into the situations in the story. Because of all this hype, I remember thinking at the time that the film really wasn’t all that violent and indeed not in any way shocking. That overly sensitive people were overreacting... which is interesting, especially given the audience reaction on this screening (I’ll get to it).

Firstly, yeah, the film doesn’t seem overtly violent or misogynistic or any of the other accusations levelled at it (I’d have gone with a 12A rating maybe... or possibly a 15 for those more sensitive souls watching). However, I do have to say that I was getting increasingly surprised by the audience reaction on this as the film played through at the NFT (where it was relegated to screen three, a mini cinema with pretty much no leg room... I still feel the pain in my knees as I write this the next morning... and just atrocious seating). People were gasping at certain scenes and it kind of popped me out of the experience a little... because a) I was thinking, “What are you gasping at? Please grow up, you can’t be that overly sensitive.” and b) seriously, were there people in this audience who hadn’t seen this ‘old master’ before?

And it is an ‘old master’. I appreciated the film a lot more now and see how it fits in as one of a few stepping stones between the director’s early films and what came, for better or worse, later in his career (and I pretty much like 99% of this guys movie output anyway... excepting Phantom Of The Opera). Of course, I use the analogy of an ‘old master’ because the film uses the very real condition known as Stendhal Syndrome (named after the famous writer, who first wrote about it but wasn’t the first to suffer from it). In the unlikely event you’ve not heard of the condition, a very quick summation is that it manifests as an overwhelming response to the aesthetics of art in close proximity. 

 The opening scene takes place in the Uffizi Gallery (to date, Argento’s the only director been allowed to shoot there because of his status in Italy, I think) and we see Asia’s young detective Anna Manni get similarly overwhelmed by the condition and actually falling into a painting, swimming around and encountering a big fish (a scene actually shot in an ocean, surprisingly, rather than a water tank although, it still looks like it’s a tank to me). She accidentally enters paintings a few times, even using a doorway opened via a painting in her hotel room to act as a flashback narrative (think Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, revisiting earlier moments of the characters’ lives) to fill the audience in on who she is (since, by this point, she’s got temporary amnesia).

And it’s a great movie which, like Argento’s earlier Tenebrae (reviewed here) utilises the trick where the identity of the main antagonist changes halfway through the movie and becomes someone else. One of those killers, who we know from very early on in the movie, is a young Thomas Kretschmann who turns in a really nice... or should that be nasty... performance. Alas, for all the red herrings in terms of suspects Argento places throughout the movie to throw the audience off the trail, I figured out the other killer from very early on when I first saw this decades ago and, yeah, I certainly hadn’t forgotten who it was. It’s a gutsy move but, totally obvious, it has to be said... although it doesn’t stop this from being a really good movie experience, that’s for sure. I think, of all Argento’s films, it was only this one and his debut, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (reviewed here) where I figured out who the antagonist was right from the outset. More often than not the director will fool me, though.

And that’s all I’m saying about this other than, despite not seeming quite as beautifully contrived in the camera movements and edits as his early classics (although the inserts of pills being swallowed from inside the throat and the bullet hole piercing a womans cheeks and being used as a spyhole are certainly in keeping with the aesthetic of the unusual shot versus versimilitude), the film is still visually arresting and I think it’s criminal that this and certain others of his later movies have had no proper Blu Ray release in this country to date (I mean, why keep reissuing the same films over and over and leave the rest neglected... the same thing applies to Jean Rollin’s output too, why aren’t his later films available?).

One piece of trivia that has stayed with me over the decades is the fact that this was, from what I can tell, the first Italian film to use CGI effects. Although they obviously look a little dated now and, I think, were only used during the scenes where The Stendhal Syndrome kicks in for Asia’s character, ushered in each time by Ennio Morricone’s hypnotic and repetitive score. Another piece of trivia is that the director’s later, much maligned movie The Card Player, was originally developed as a sequel to this film and was to have Asia Argento  reprising her role here, before real life circumstances took that movie in another direction.

After all these years I think I’d place this in the upper half of Argento’s movies if I ranked them and I certainly enjoyed the film (if not quite the experience of siting in those seats at the NFT) as much, if not more, than the first time I watched it. Definitely recommended to Argento fans and, especially, to people unfamiliar with his work, I think.