Without Knowing Anything About Her

Assisted Development

Without Knowing 
Anything About Her
aka Senza Sapere 
Niente Di Lei
aka Unknown Woman
Italy 1969 Directed by Luigi Comencini
Conway Films DVD Region 0

Warning: Full on spoilers of the slight plot and ending.

Back around 2002, a new Italian soundtrack CD label started up called Digitmovies. They’re still going but they don’t seem to have as much presence on the market as when they first started, it seems to me. One of the scores I bought from them in either the first or second year of their existence was a beautiful Ennio Morricone score for a film I’d never seen called Senza Sapere Niente Di Lei, which translates into Without Knowing Anything About Her and, from that moment on, it was in my CD player all the time for a good long while. It soon became one of my all time favourite Morricone scores, in fact... even though it’s quite minimal in content and had to be bolstered up by four tracks from an unrealised project on the same disc (which are also great, as it happens). I looked around to find the film but never could until, a recent* purchase of a disc of admittedly dubious origins. I don’t think this has had a proper subtitled commercial release alas. But it certainly needs the Blu Ray treatment because, honestly, it turns out that this is a truly beautiful and enthralling movie, even though not a heck of a lot happens. 

It’s been touted by many as a giallo and, well, it’s not what we think of as a cinematic variant of the giallo film today for sure. This is another one which came out in that little five or so year period, just after Mario Bava had made a couple of giallo and just before Dario Argento cemented the stylistic tropes and the genre exploded on the big screen... and like films of that ilk such as The Sweet Body Of Deborah (reviewed here) and A Black Veil For Lisa (reviewed here), it’s more an echo of the original literary forms of giallo which were touted by publishers like Mondadori back in those days. So, I’m not taking a side on this one but if you’re expecting black gloved killers and lurid deaths then, you won’t find anything like that here.

Instead, what we have is a film where almost nothing happens at all but it’s just wonderful. It deals with an insurance investigator Nanni (played by Philippe Leroy) who is trying to prove that a woman who has died committed suicide, so his company won’t have to make a big pay out to the family (which is a plot you find a lot in these kinds of film and especially noir thrillers, although this movie is based on a novel, La morale privata by Antonio Leonviola). Before anything can be properly contested, though, he has to track down the youngest of the woman’s three daughters so all the family can be present. However, when he finally catches up with Cinzia (played by Paola Pitagora), the two fall in love and end up sleeping together. Alas, when Cinzia finds out he’s an investigator into her mother’s insurance claim, she slits her wrists in her bath. After Nanni nurses her back to health, the two continue thier love affair but things get a bit dark when, finally, she confesses to him that she actually performed an assisted suicide on her mum... but, by then, Nanni is already implicated legally in the case and so he needs to somehow prove both their innocence. Before he can do that, however, Cinzia drives their car into oncoming traffic and Nanni dies (while Cinzia is injured badly and may or may not pull through). 

And it’s a slight story but it’s not about that. It’s about two absolutely blistering and well written performances of the male and female leads, some beautiful music and some absolutely fantastic shot compositions. Okay, so as to the performances... Philippe Leroy is absolutely amazing. He comes across at first as quite a timid character but he has a real strong and confident undercurrent... a real flesh and blood person brought to life with some amazing and subtle facial expressions which tell you everything about the mental state of the character in any specific shot. And he’s coupled with Paola Pitagora, who’s sensational in this and looks like Guido Crepax just drew her and she stepped out of one of his Valentina comics (in fact, why was this actress not tapped to play Valentina on film?). She’s breathtakingly gorgeous as the screwed up daughter who is completely confused by everything going on in the world around her and, honestly, I could just sit and watch these two actors chatting in character in a room or in a park for hours at a time. So I was kinda in luck when, it turns out, that a lot of the movie is... well, exactly that. 

And as for the cinematography. Wow. The director and camera guy do that thing where they use vertical lines found in the environments to split the shots into segments to place the actors in but, they have a beautiful twist on this approach because the verticals are usually sitting on an angle thrown out by the perspective over a distance, which gives it an even fresher and out of kilter feel. They tend to push the angles and the verticals quite a lot in the movie. For instance, a shot of the two protagonists in bed opens a scene and they are at an angle with various verticals either side of them... it’s only when they pan left to a more straight view of the scene that you realise you were looking at the scene in a huge refection in an angled mirror taking up the majority of the opening of the shot. 

Another great moment is when the two of them are talking in medium shot from opposite ends of a park bench angled slighty to the left and away in perspective from the camera. They are also sitting facing out from different sides of the bench... so you have Leroy sitting with his back mostly turned to us in the distance on the left of the screen and Pitagora in a more close up version with her face more or less angled towards the camera on the extreme right of the screen, which looks fantastic. And to top the shot off, there’s a vertical tree trunk in the background in the centre of the screen, splitting the two parts of the shot and giving each actor their own zone to perform in. It’s marvellous stuff. 

Even when he’s dealing with loads of people in a room, the director finds a way to make the compositions dynamic. For instance, when four people including Leroy are standing in a living room in a line as they are talking, three of them taking up the right three quarters of the screen are all in one depth while a fourth guy, taking up the left quarter, is more in close up and shaking a cocktail... it all just gives a visual richness to the shots which are among some of the best compositions I’ve seen (which seems to be a key thing with Italian film and their gialli in particular). 

The most clever thing he does, though, is to foreshadow the suicidal car crash of Cinzia at the tail end of the film. The audience is certainly aware from her body language and implied dialogue (not so, Nanni) that she is about to drive them both into oblivion when she asks if she can drive. We never see the car drive off and the accident is left entirely off screen other than a bit of the aftermath but as she goes to pull out, the next shot is a police car siren as it rushes to the presumed accident, the blaring, wailing sound acting as a surrogate for the shock of the unseen crash itself, and it’s brilliant... as the camera then cuts to a shot of Nanni’s lonesome hat and Cinzia’s abandoned handbag on the ground, thrown clear, somewhere away from the site of the wreck. 

And that’s it. Although it’s light on action I would recommend Without Knowing Anything About Her to pretty much anyone I know. It’s a gentle and romantic film with two amazing performances and with absolutely astounding cinematography and music. It’s a crime that this movie has never had a proper UK or USA release in this day and age and this absolutely needs a subtitled Blu Ray print to come on the market. What a brilliant film. You need to see this one. 

*Not that recent but, at time of writing, pre-pandemic.

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.