OSS117 - Double Agent

The Assassination Game

OSS117 - Double Agent
aka Niente rose per OSS 117
aka OSS117 Murder For Sale
France/Italy 1968
Directed by Renzo Cerrato, 
Jean-Pierre Desagnat & André Hunebelle
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Well this is going to be another very short OSS117 review but I can finally say I’m very disappointed with Kino Lorber’s Blu Ray set, OSS117 Five Film Collection, which collects the films made about this character in the 1960s and which, in the case of this film, is based on Jean Bruce’s novel Pas de roses pour OSS 117. Not because Kino Lorber have done a bad job... on the contrary, the transfers and prints on these things look fantastic. I think it’s more that these bandwagon competitors to the Bond franchise are just, mainly, as dull as ditchwater. And I can’t blame the actors either. 

OSS117 - Double Agent is about Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, alias OSS117, infiltrating the crime syndicate known as ‘The Organisation’ (no, not that organisation... a much smaller, fictional one) in order to foil their plan of assassinating people for money. Why the secret service are targetting this organisation in particular was, I think, passed off with an attempted explanation at the start which I really didn’t understand and it felt like a bit of an excuse to be honest. The plot goes from silly to worse as OSS117 is injected with a poison which will kill him once every 24 hours unless he has the next stage of the antidote, as the way his new employers try to keep their hired help on a leash and more pliable to their assassination missions. Hubert gets involved with a few ladies, has a few fist fights and eventually saves the day in the most anticlimactic, throwaway manner possible... which you wouldn’t expect from a film populated with some quite good actors, to be honest. 

For this fifth and final of the 1960s screen outings for the character, the lead actor has once again been replaced. John Gavin is playing him here and there’s even a reference... and a jokey dig... to the change in the male lead this time as one character describes him as having had plastic surgery to look like a specific killer and he gets the reply, “He’s much better looking now.” I guess it serves as some kind of testament to the acting talent that even Gavin... who was later signed on to take over from George Lazenby as James Bond, starting with Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here), before Sean Connery decided to come back on board at the eleventh hour... can’t help save this film. The script and pacing is so awful. 

Nor can some of the other exciting names in the cast liven things up either... such as George Eastman playing a splendid henchman to the arch villain, played by future Bond villain Curd Jürgens, the wonderful Rosalba Neri and, five years after trying to kill Connery’s 007 in Thunderball (reviewed here), the stunning Luciana Paluzzi. I am guessing Paluzzi may just have been cast for her former association with the Bond film because, bizarrely, she disappears from the narrative about a third of the way in and is never mentioned again, even when it’s logical that OSS117 should run into her again at the close of the picture. 

Replacing composer Michel Magne for this one is the late but very great Piero Piccioni but, it has to be said, as nice as this score is as a standalone listen on CD, even Piccioni can’t save this one. I have to wonder at producer/director André Hunebelle’s decisions about this. He has two great composers on these films and it’s like he’s ordered them to play almost against the images and make them feel somewhat antiseptic and inappropriate to what’s going on in the film. As I said, Piccioni’s music sounds very easy on the ears but, really, does nothing to improve this one. A John Barry score would have really helped liven this picture up but, yeah, I have to wonder how both Magne and Piccioni seemed to both turn up such ‘out of place’ scores for these movies. 

And that really is me done with OSS117 Double Agent. I said it was going to be a short review and I can’t think of anything really good to say about the experience. The film feels somewhat lethargic and has a script which really lets everyone down. I can’t, in all consciousness, recommend this one to anybody. Possibly the dullest eurospy movie I’ve seen, I would guess. 

Piercing

Giallo Jukebox

Piercing
USA 2018 Directed by  Nicolas Pesce
Vertigo DVD Region 2

Okay, so let me start off by saying that, despite the title of this review, Piercing is not in any way, shape or form, a giallo. However, what it does do, like a fair few modern movies just lately since the resurgence of the giallo movie as a popular genre of home entertainment, is take certain aspects of the cinematic language of the genre to use on a film which, in this case, certainly isn’t an example of that particular form. This is often a successful choice with movies like Amer (reviewed here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here) successfully mining certain aspects of this cinematic legacy to enrich the experience.

Now I didn’t realise that Piercing would be going down this route when I bought it. I was basically laying to rest a ghost because it clashed with something else I wanted to see at last year’s FrightFest and I was awaiting a local cinema release only to find it didn’t get any kind of general theatrical release over here at all... which is a shame because at least then I would have known not to bother with this DVD release (oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?).

The other reason I wanted to see this is because it’s based on a novel by Ryû Murakami (no relation, as far as I can tell, to the other famous, literary Murakami) and I was curious because I’d read his book In The Miso Soup and also I kinda found interesting (though ultimately not great) another film I’d seen based on one of his books, Tokyo Decadence (reviewed by me here). So, yeah, this plus the promise of sexualised BDSM play invoked by the title and the film’s limited marketing combined with one of the lead protagonist’s/antagonist’s being played by Mia Wasikowska, who seems intent on picking very interesting roles and bringing something unusual to them, had me wanting to see this one.

So I popped this into the smart drive hooked up to my Mac (the one advantage of not being able to get an easily accessible Blu Ray release in the UK of this film) and the first thing that surprised me was the menu of this bare bones release. The main theme of one of my favourite Bruno Nicolai giallo scores, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, is used for both the menu and, bizarrely, various cues from this and other gialli and exploitation films are also used liberally throughout. So that’s one of the two main gialloistic elements used in this movie and I’ll get right back to the music shortly.

Preceding the opening logos we have one of those old style, distressed film stock “Feature Presentation” graphics to announce the film. This seems to have caught on with a few film-makers since Quentin Tarantino did something similar on Kill Bill. This is followed by all the company logos being on a distressed film stock and... it’s a pretty mixed message to be honest because as soon as the actual film starts, we are into pin sharp, high definition images in direct contrast to the style of those opening graphics. So I don’t know what’s going on there because the film is definitely not the kind of grindhouse experience you would expect from something introduced like that.

Now, I’m pretty sure the opening titles are a beautiful pan over what I suspect is a model of a big city skyline, with various scenes showing through the windows. And this is scored by what I believe to be Stelvio Cipriani’s score for What Have They Done To Your Daughters? Which got a big shout out on the soundtrack to the aforementioned Amer, too. That being said, although there is a long list of music credits at the rear end of the movie, I didn’t catch this one listed so... maybe I’m confused. Can anyone else confirm that this is definitely this soundtrack used in this and one other sequence on the movie... it definitely sounds like it to me. Back to the music again soon.

The film starts with Christopher Abbott as Reed, who is clearly a little psychotic as he obviously wants to kill his baby and nearly does that until the mother of his child interrupts him. He soon goes off to rent a hotel room and hire a prostitute, Jackie played by Mia Wasikowska, with the intention of murdering her and cutting up her body before putting it all in a bag for disposal. And when he is in the hotel room there’s a nice scene where we see him rehearsing the whole murder with certain sounds of what the murder should sound like... the slicing of flesh, the splashing of blood, the tying of the bag etc... thrown into the scene. Now, I didn’t have a shred of empathy with Reed’s character here, who seems to be the Walter Mitty of serial killers... neither with that of Wasikowska when you finally get a taste of her true character, but I have to say both actors did well with their roles and Reed comes off as a somewhat driven but reluctant psycho... which just made me dislike him even more to be honest but you can’t deny that Abbott does a good job here.

When Jackie arrives at Reed’s hotel room, to the strains of Goblin’s main them for Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red), you assume nothing will go as planned because, why else show us a rehearsal scene showing what should happen? And, yes, it doesn’t and once Jackie goes to have a shower, when Reed goes in to see what’s taking her so long, you’ll get your first real surprise of the movie. I won’t ruin this for you but I will say that, after Reed has taken Jackie to the hospital and waits for her outside, he has a conversation with his wife on a phone about the murder. Except, you know she knows nothing about it in real life so the conversation is obviously in his head. Things like the ‘talking baby’ telling him that he knows what he has to do at the start of the movie are pretty much a dead giveaway about Reed’s mental state through all of this.  This kind of takes the punch out of pretty much anything else that happens after this point where Jackie takes Reed back to her ‘red room’ and starts to turn the tables on him... in really obvious, unsurprising ways, it has to be said.

Okay, you’re probably getting a sense that I didn’t really like this movie now and... well... I did and I didn’t. The stylistic mise en scène and framing of those old giallo movies, the second element that this film borrows from that particular strand of cinematic heritage, is beautiful. People are sectioned off in sometimes overly tidy and crisp shot designs and even a split screen sequence recalling the early ‘American gialli’ of Brian De Palma is in evidence and goes a long way towards making up for the film’s short falls. The colours are beautiful too and I love those old scores being used... especially for the end titles, a lot of which uses a truncated version of the main theme from Argento’s Tenebre and I assume the accompanying pan through those same models (I’m still convinced they are models) of the cityscape is an homage to Argento’s ‘moving camera over architecture’ moments from films like that. Even if it’s not... it works for me. Of course, the cynical amongst us (I’m waiting for a comment from one of my friends after he reads this review) would say that the director has just got a bunch of old giallo tunes and thrown it at the film in the usual needle-drop manner and... I’d have to say I wouldn’t disagree with that either.

Actually, one of the big stumbling blocks about using music like this is the game the audience is suddenly playing about ‘what film does that come from’ as they are watching. However, I don’t mind this aspect but I do believe that the director really makes a bad call in a couple of instances in this movie because, sometimes, music can also have strong emotional baggage attached to it and such is the case here, in a couple of scenes where he’s used Piero Piccioni’s wonderful score to Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 (reviewed by me here) which immediately brings up the sympathies of young lovers, tragically doomed which... well I may be wrong but I don’t really think that’s the emotion he’s going for in the scenes where he uses one of Piccioni’s most poignant themes, to be honest. Still, he’s not the first contemporary director to needle drop excerpts from this score into his film but... I think it could have been done with a more appropriate deference to the on screen images here.

So, summing up then... this film has beautiful performances by the two leads, stylish camera work and shot design, wonderful stolen music and... those are its main pluses. Alas, I can only assume this is a pretty good adaptation of the novel because, as a film exploring the kind of subject area touched upon here, it completely disappoints and never really goes far enough. The fetishistic sexuality and violence are never really pushed into the kinds of extreme territory you would hope they would go into to give a more accurate and less whimsical approach to this kind of exploration and, ultimately, I don’t think I could completely recommend this one to people unless you are purely in it for the music and cinematography. Ultimately, despite the strength and vibrance of those elements, it still manages to be fairly bland and unambitious as a film and I really was expecting a little more from it than what we got here. Even with Mia Wasikowska's customary off-kilter take on her character, this film really didn’t feel edgy in any way and I felt that, as someone who quite enjoys the odd film exploring extreme sensations and situations, I probably wasn’t the more virginal, vanilla target audience that I suspect this one was designed for. So not my cup of tea despite the spot on stylistic sensibilities inherent in the film’s DNA, to be honest. Piercing could have done with some boundary pushing, I think.

Splintered Visions

Fulci In Motion

Splintered Visions -
Lucio Fulci and His Films
by Troy Howarth
Midnight Marquee Press
ISBN: 978-1936168613

Lucio Fulci is one of those directors who I’m never sure whether I’m on board with. I loved his films like Lizard In A Woman’s Skin (reviewed briefly here), Seven Notes In Black (aka The Psychic), Don’t Torture A Duckling, The New York Ripper (reviewed here), City of the Living Dead (reviewed here) and The Beyond (reviewed here) whereas others such as Four Of The Apocalypse and The House By The Cemetery (reviewed here) leave me completely cold. And then others such as Manhattan Baby (reviewed here) and his much celebrated Zombi (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters aka Zombie 2, reviewed here) are quite fun but with some clear problems which I’m only just about able to overlook. So whenever anyone asks me how I feel about Lucio Fulci as a director... I’m never too sure how to reply.

So I decided to read a book about him and see what I was missing.

Troy Howarth’s Splintered Visions - Lucio Fulci And His Films is actually a pretty good tome if you want to know a little bit more about the subject although, I would add the caveat that, as excellent as the book is (and it really is), it tends to focus on the ‘and his films’ part of the title more than it does the man himself. Although, in terms of his collaborators... well I feel I know a little more about them.

The book starts off with an intro by Brett Halsey which, in terms of the typographic design of the book goes, seems to inexplicably blend into the author’s own preface and makes a nonsense of the words until you realise that a software design accident must have happened and gone unnoticed before going to print. After this though, we get a fantastic study of the films that Fulci worked on in one capacity or another, highlighting his work when he started out and not only as a director but as a writing contributor too. So the early sections about his career in his celluloid endeavours was really interesting to me because I knew nothing about it.

As the volume progresses, the same format is utilised all the way through but Howarth, who really does know how to write about this stuff in the way that a lot of academics aren’t able to master, throws in loads of peripheral information about the various actors, actresses, writers, special effects guys and composers of note who worked on various films with Fulci. And it all seems very thorough and very interesting. Not as thorough as Tim Lucas’ book on Mario Bava, of course but, certainly I learned a lot I didn’t know while reading through here. For example, I found out a little about composer Piero Piccioni being accused and linked with a murder charge on an infamous, unsolved case involving the death of a woman on a beach and I also found out that famous singer Mina was, apparently, publically shunned for her pregnancy by a married actor she was having an affair with. Stuff like this hardly ever comes up on album liner notes so it was interesting to be reading this kind of information here.

Another thing Howarth does, aside from reveal little gems about the conditions Fulci had to put up with on set... such as panning around a shot with the furniture being immediately removed by repo men as said items left the camera’s field of vision because the producer owed so much money, is the regular insertion of interviews with various key people and collaborators from Fulci’s long career. Some of these are lifelong friends and others are people who only worked with him once but many of the insights are, if not always invaluable, at least entertaining. And it's especially nice to hear from one of his more frequent musical collaborators, composer Fabio Frizzi, about his working relationship with him.

It’s interesting in that Fulci’s notoriety at treating his actors and actresses like cattle (and worse) is acknowledged by almost everyone who is interviewed for this book but, as far as I can see, only one person in the book has said he was actually like that to them. One wonders if the legend of his behaviour is more of a storm in a tea cup or, perhaps more likely, the majority of people who could have been interviewed had no interest in talking to people involved with a book extolling Fulci’s virtues.

The reason this is only a fairly short review is because the only complaint I really have about this book is that, although I felt I knew a fair few of Fulci’s films better... which I’m grateful to the author for because I now know which ones to seek out and which ones to ignore... I didn’t feel I knew Fulci ‘the man’ in any way better than I had before going in and, since I knew practically nothing about him before I started reading, I guess in terms of the personality behind the films, I felt a little short changed in that respect.

That being said, the writer had me on his side straight away by rejecting the claim, early on in the book, that the non-Fulci film Perfume Of The Lady In Black (reviewed here) is, in any way, a giallo film. Sure, it uses the cinematic language of the gialli being made at the time but, if it was going to have to be pigeon-holed into a particular genre of Italian exploitation cinema... giallo is not the one I would label put it in (and to label it would give away the ending of the movie to anyone who’s not seen it so I’m not commenting further on that here). Howarth is a writer I now trust to write competently and informatively about various aspects of cinema and I shall be seeking out further books from this gentleman in future, I think. If you are a relative Fulci novice, like me, then you will find a lot of information in this book and it’s written in an accessible and entertaining way. If you are more of an expert, well I think the ‘devil’s honey’ is in the detail and I believe you will still find this one informative for all the many nuggets of information about various other figures involved with Italian cinema at the time. Whichever camp you are in, Splintered Visions - Lucio Fulci And His Films is a strong recommendation from me as I think this is an indispensable book for people interested in this man’s work... if not necessarily the man himself.

Viva

Leave It To Viva

Viva
USA 2007
Directed by Anna Biller
Anna Biller Productions/Shameless DVD Region 2

It’s really interesting seeing what is, effectively, Anna Biller’s first full length feature only a few weeks after seeing her second, The Love Witch (reviewed here), because I can now pick up on the tremendous similarities between the two and, temporarily at least, assign director signature traits to her (woohoo!). It also means she pretty much demonstrates, through her various artistic choices which follow through in both films, that she’s very much an ‘auteur’ director in the sense of captaining her specific celluloid ships through the same route. If you see what I mean.

Like The Love Witch, Viva uses a slightly surreal, ‘on the surface’, over the top acting style which I personally associate with American TV sitcoms from the 1950s - 1970s. It’s more overtly signposted within the text here, to a certain extent, due to the fact that Biller seems to be trying her best to make an early to mid-1970s US sexploitation picture and, although the highly comical acting method demonstrated in Viva (and in The Love Witch, for that matter) is certainly not endemic to that genre (although obviously some movies, like Doris Wishman’s films, use it almost by default in terms of the talent of the actors and actresses available), it’s at least ‘of the time’. Biller seems, to me, a little more subversive in that, while she is, after all, very definitely making an exploitation movie - this one has tons of nudity including Biller herself as lead character Barbie/Viva - she seems, at least to me, to be very much expressing it in the same way that an episode of The Brady Bunch or Bewitched might try and portray it. Which is... you know... kinda interesting and certainly makes for the cinematic equivalent of a page turner, in this case.

The opening follows Biller’s character Barbie from the bath where she’s reading a magazine and drinking before she vacates said vessel to get made up and dressed. Roaring off in her red, open top car which, since this is an Anna Biller movie, matches the same shade as the outfit she is wearing. And, that’s another stylistic tag which I’m going to lumber Biller with here... the exceptionally groovy colour palette she uses matches what she did nine years later in The Love Witch in that everybody’s outfits seem designed to either perfectly match to, or contrast against, the decor of the set they are seen in. For example, in one scene where Barbie and her husband are visiting her best friends, Sheila and her husband - two perfect nuclear families with cracks hidden beneath their ‘beautiful people’ surface - one guy is wearing a green top and the other guy is wearing a white shirt but with trousers which match the exact shade of green of the first guy’s top. It’s pretty nice stuff and, although one might say she’s taking a page out of the era in which she’s set this film... Los Angeles 1972... that certainly doesn’t hold for The Love Witch and I think it says more about the director’s impeccable taste when it comes to pulling all the details and colours of the mise en scène together in the most exquisite way. I’m telling you right now people... I’d love to see this woman make an Italian giallo.

She also, like in her later film, uses the decor to express the motivations of her characters... often through the use of paintings which make overt their attitudes towards certain issues. It’s not an uncommon modus operandi but it’s a nice touch and I’ll add that quirk to my ever growing list of Anna Biller signature marks, if I may (at least until she grows in a different direction, as most directors do).

The scene following on from the opening where Sheila and her husband talk about Playboy and drink an alcoholic breakfast ends up with Sheila about to strip down so her good, wholesome husband can take ‘artistic’ shots of her... seems more like a porn movie but it’s incredibly heightened, with lots of fake laughter by all the actors who perform their roles wonderfully (including Biller herself), before Barbie turns up and then both girls strip off for the ‘arty photos’. Biller seems both inspired by Playboy in this movie while similarly poking fun at the people who read it (Shelia proclaims, at one point, that old chestnut “I only read it for the articles...”). It’s a brilliant little parody of the kind of ‘soft porn logic’ combined with deliberately ‘bad acting’ which really nails and telegraphs the mood Biller is going for in a very quick way. She even goes so far as to deliberately mis-match shots to create little continuity errors between them to further authenticate the delivery of her agenda. At least... I assume it was deliberate?

Of course, one of the things which this is doing, in a film inhabited by generally stupid characters, male and female, is to show the sexism and attitudes of either sex in a repressive social set up. You have the guys getting together to talk about their latest technological equipment like their new stereo or TV (actually... that doesn’t sound too different to where we are now, to be honest) and the ladies getting together for conversations which, quite frankly, don’t just fail the Bechdel test but defy it in the most spectacular fashion. One husband, for example, sits patiently for his wife to give him his pipe and light it for him. Now, I grew up in the 1970s so it’s probably harder for me to identify where these common occurrences of everyday sexism (at least as it is perceived these days) begin and end but Biller makes it crystal clear for the audience in one lovely moment when a pampered guy looks straight into the camera and says...

“There's never been a better time to be a man. The willing women. The dandy clothes. The frills. The big rings and jewellery. The open shirts. The sense of entitlement. Take it from me: savour this time. For it will soon be gone, never to return.”

As the film progressed I found that, rather than get bored by what might, at first, seem like a one joke movie, I was witness to a minor masterpiece with something new and rewarding in most scenes. There’s some great stuff in here... the stereotypical gay male hairdresser who is working on Barbie’s hair and the neighbour who comes in to ‘borrow a cup of sugar’ (both Barbie and the hairdresser get turned on by the watching neighbour’s sugar eating shenanigans), the silly songs (which are a heck of a lot more on the nose in this than they were in The Love Witch, it seems to me), the old “Give it to me! Love it! Oh yes!” rapid shoot photographer scene (I used to be a child model in the early 1970s and I can tell you now, stereotype or not, that’s exactly how some of them behaved) and the fact that when her husband is taken ill and being treated in hospital with stress because she comes home late one night rather than have the dinner waiting, she feels it’s appropriate to go to the hospital in a sexy nurse outfit to show how much she intends to care for her husband. There’s some crazy stuff in this film.

Now I was a little puzzled, as I was with The Love Witch when I saw this because, while the director is doing her best to evoke America in the early 1970s, the soundtrack sounds more like it’s been needle-dropped in from Italian composers and, as it turns out once again, that’s exactly what is happening here. However, I figured it out after a while because there were a few scenes which sounded like they were being tracked in from Piero Piccioni’s score to US sexploitation director Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 and, by about the third time it turned up on the soundtrack in one guise or another, I was pretty sure. This is further enhanced during a big orgy scene where Viva, as the reimagined call-girl variation of Barbie is known, is being drug-raped. Biller actually uses the same differential focussing and refocussing trick, timed to the main character’s breathing, that Metzger used in Camille 2000 and which you can find fully described by me in my review of that film here. And this, coupled with the score in this scene, very specifically identifies at least one of the director’s main inspirations for this movie... albeit with a much different motivation towards the subject matter.

About that sequence... although the mise en scène in this shot isn’t nearly as accomplished as Metzger’s original version, Biller takes it all to the next absurdist level. In this one, instead of focussing on flowers, Biller focusses on apples and then, after the shot I just described, the colours posterise and the apples become animated, floating fruits licking and then continuing with one eating the others. That cartoon apple then stretches or warps out to become a load of swirling, psychedelic flowers before the blood or juice of the apple starts to shower down over the live action screen of Viva being molested. It’s almost like the artist is criticising the original scene by going so over the top with it that you can’t help but see how ridiculous it is... at least in this context. I was blown away by the shot in Camille 2000 and still am. However, it’s a great visual moment from Biller in a film which is filled to the brim with amazing stuff like this.

And that’s about as far as I’m going with this review, I think, other than to say that Viva was a total blast to watch and, with lines like (on being informed a man’s wife has got a job interview) “Will you be back in time to cook dinner?” and a parody of Just Two Little Girls From Little Rock from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the film has enough surprises and little tricks up its sleeve to keep you entertained for its considerable two hours (a fair amount longer than most of the sexploitation films the director is parodying to make her points here). A solid recommendation on this one with the reminder that you need to keep an open mind about the style of acting in this and not dismiss it until you realise how skillful the artists are being here. Now I just have to wait around while the lady in question makes another movie. Can we have a giallo next, please?

Camille 2000

Camille Toed

Camille 2000
Italy 1969
Directed by Radley Metzger
Arrow Films Blu Ray Region B

Camille 2000 is only the second film I’ve seen directed by Radley Metzger but, like The Lickerish Quartet, which I reviewed here, I was totally blown away by it and I’m absolutely appalled by the lack of response and interest in this film that both the IMDB and certain influential critical web sites have seen fit to let stand. I only knew Metzger before I saw The Lickerish Quartet, by reputation, as a man who made cheesy sexploitation and porn films but, frankly, this is the second time I’ve been both mesmerised and enthused by the way he handles his art and I think this director is worth a lot more of any cineaste’s time... whether that’s an unpopular statement to make or not.

Camille 2000 is Metzger’s, then, contemporary reworking of Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame Aux Camélias but, sad to say, I only know the original work through a reference in Woody Allen’s old stand up routines of the 1960s... so I can’t compare this movie in terms of adaptation although, in all fairness, I don’t think it’s trying to be anything other than slightly inspired by what I’ll grudgingly call the ‘source material’ here. The Allen routine, with the one throwaway line about the original, did tip me off to how the movie was going to end, though, it has to be said.

When I saw The Lickerish Quartet, I’m sure I probably made reference in some way to the metatextual nature of the narrative and the way in which Metzger pulls the objective rug out from the viewer half way through and makes you think about... and question... everything you are seeing. There’s not a heck of a lot of that going on in this movie but he does include a bookending device which plunges you into a similar dilemma of how you might, or might not, read the images differently in context of the whole story and this bookend starts with the title of the movie shouted out by a crew member, possibly Metzger himself, as it is seen in the context of a clapperboard announcing the unfolding film as a specific take. So that’s all quite interesting and I’m wondering if this kind of implied versus perceived reality is a particular fetish or obsession for Metzger and whether it crops up as a signature gesture in many of his other works.

What I do know for sure is that he takes a simplistic plot of a man falling for a woman... a lady who is used to a less morally inclined lifestyle... and explores their relationship, break up and the true nature of their wounded love for each other while embellishing it with a sense of beauty and 'aesthetic wow' which makes the whole thing worth watching. Margueritte, played by the gorgeous Danièle Gaubert, the Carmille character in the film (it’s her nickname because of the flowers she always has around and the ties to the Dumas character it conjures up in people’s minds... oh wait, there’s that metatextuality again) sacrifices her own happiness and breaks up with her naive new lover Armand, played by Nino Castelnuov. Armand is one of many lovers she has and she ditches him because she believes the words of his father that they can never be happy together due to certain aspects of their basic nature. And therein lays the tragedy, of course.

In anyone else’s hands this story might seem dull and pointless but Metzger’s artistry is pushed to the fore and he shows us various encounters between the lovers and their friends (many sexual or filled with nudity) and every scene seemed to me to be a toolbox of new visual treasures... both in style and also, of course, in content. One lady wears a beautiful string vest style dress which hugs her in all the right, revealing  places and it would be true to say that there’s a lot of fascination in this particular movie with see-through costumes... but it’s not just in the costuming that this interest manifests itself.

Yes, there’s a whole lot of transparent or semi transparent costumes in the movie but the director also shows an interest in shooting through or against similar textures made from glass or mirrors and he uses this often to make multiple planes or sections in a screen to position his actresses and actors in, giving us beautiful compositions worthy of some of the most celebrated cinematic artists of our time. This is especially true of the sex scenes and there aren’t many, maybe one or possibly not even that, which aren’t shot through some kind of third party texture or substance.

For instance the first sex scene of the movie, which includes off-screen fellatio, is rendered as various shots through mirrors. Later on, the ‘love making’ utilises the reflections in a whole bank of mirrored panels used to show multiple views of the coupling. Starting off with five panels we, after a while, cut to a close up shot of two of the panels and then we pan along the small bank of mirrors before cutting back to the master shot and repeating the same movement in a larger view of what turns out to be many, multiple mirrors which make up one of the walls of Margeurite’s bed chamber.

In fact, all the sex scenes are equally inventively and tastefully shot, with one specific part of one of the sex scenes being pretty much the only one not executed through some kind of artifically occurring, reflecting or refracting viewpoint. The specific shot I’m thinking of is quite amazing and I want to try to describe it for you here...

Marguerite is lying naked on her back on a bed with only her head and shoulders shown, filling half of the frame coming in from the left of the shot, while Armand performs, presumably, an act of cunnilingus on her. So her head and shoulders are forming a horizontal profile within half of the landscape ratio of the shot. There is a bowl of white flowers, presumably Carmelias, filling up the foreground, in front of her, in the right hand side of the shot. As Margeurite’s pleasure mounts, her breathing becomes heavier on the soundtrack and this is when Metzger (and I believe he went to  lot of trouble to get this set up to work) starts changing the rack focussing of the shot to bring the flowers into deep focus and blur Marguerite’s head and upper body. As she sighs and breathes in and out on her approach to orgasm, Metzger starts refocussing the shot , alternating between her and the flowers, as she breathes in or out... giving us a pulsing and very visual representation of Marguerite’s head space by illustrating it with the rhythm of the constantly shifting differential focussing.

So that’s orgasm through rack focussing... and it’s pretty amazing to watch. Worth the price of admission alone, I would say.

It’s a movie with a lot of visual and conceptual inventiveness throughout and this sets it apart from others. There’s lots of big, inflatable furniture, some completely transparent (just to follow a visual theme, I guess) and the set design when the two ex-lovers separately attend a BDSM themed sex party is quite gob smacking in its execution... what with big dangly chains, gold sparkly stocks and bright colours... not to mention the cage for having sex in the corner, for all to see (and you can bet that Metzger takes full cinematic advantage of his compositional eye with all the vertical sections thrown up by those bars). It’s like ‘nobody in real life’s’ idea of good taste BDSM or in any way realistic to 'the scene' but... it’s quite an eye opener and has a certain sense of charm and fun to it that, perhaps, is something that should be brought back to current BDSM lifestyle trends in some ways. It’s just the kind of party I’d love to attend and... well, I don’t even do parties.

The film is peppered with cool and witty little touches too like, for example, a lady exhaling from the joint she’s been smoking into a balloon, thus inflating it, before passing it on to the next person, who deflates the ballon in his mouth... which is kind of a nice visual way to show this whole kind of drug sharing routine. Or there’s the moment when Armand realises that Camille has not turned up for their date because she is sleeping with another man, so the next day he sends her a personal message of a woman turning up at her door. The messenger turns her back on Marguerite and steps out of her clothes, revealing a written note on her back from Armand, scrawled in lipstick or some other media, which says “You are a whore. I was an idiot.” The implication of how Armand got the message on the gal is plain but also one which Marguerite finds amusing and not in any way troubling... perhaps even a little endearing and this, perhaps, highlights the difference between the inner worlds the two inhabit.

Another interesting scene comes up towards the end of the film, where Armand and the current 'successor' to Marguerite’s charms play a James Bondesque duel of Chemin De Fer, both trading insults about the other’s character and, perhaps unfairly, about Marguerite’s value as a human being too. This was a little hard to watch because, frankly, the tragic character of Marguerite was very much the hero of the story, for me.

There are a load of, pretty much soft core in this case, sex scenes scattered throughout the movie and I have to say they were less than erotic but much more interesting to watch on a visual level... which is one of the key things I personally respond to in terms of cinematic aesthetics. It wasn't the sex scenes that kept me hard, it was the way in which the director used the camera which kept my enthusiasm at much more than half mast. It’s also quite striking that a scene towards the end of the movie, set in a hospital, has the two main characters separated by a plastic, transparent, life support tent... which is kind of an interesting sense of synchronisation with the tone of the characters when you consider that the majority of the sex scenes in the movie between these two are shot via either a reflective or transparent surface... or a groan inducing combination of the two.

Piero Piccioni’s score is, unsurprisingly for a composer of his character, utterly fantastic too. Unfortunately, the soundtrack was issued ages ago by the now, pretty much defunct, Right Tempo label and so it’s quite rare and expensive in a physical edition these days (and if I want to get into the spirit of Camille 2000, then I definitely want to get physical with it). As I was watching, I realised that I had probably already got at least half the musical cues on this because it’s one of those scores which always tends to get represented, by some track or another, on many of the Italian exploitation score compilations I have in the racks... but I’d still like to get my hands on the full version at some point (there’s a download available but... who has room on their computer for downloads?).

And that’s pretty much it, in terms of Camille 2000. I was completely bowled over by the technical artistry in this film and I really need to see more of Radley Metzger’s work now. Unfortunately, a lot of his stuff is quite badly censored in the UK so I’m going to have to do my research and look farther afield than what can be found on these Victorian shores (actually, with the state of censorship in this country as it is, this statement is quite insulting to Victorian values... we’re far worse off in the United Kingdom now than the Victorians ever were). As far as this movie goes, though, the Arrow Blu Ray restoration and remaster is a thing of beauty and it’s got a few nice extras on it too. Definitely something I’d recommend to most lovers of cinema, I think... regardless of the reputation it seems to have garnered over the years. Grab this one while you can.

La Decima Vittima (The 10th Victim)

State Of Andress

La Decima Vittima 
(The 10th Victim)
1965 Italy
Directed by Elio Petri
Shameless 
DVD Region 0/BluRay Region B

Warning: Slight spoilers because some 
of the scenes are just so damned fun!

It was about thirteen years ago that I first became properly aware of The 10th Victim. I know this because it was the same year that one of my best friends moved away from his ancestral home and had a house warming party. A listing in the National Film Theatre for the movie caught my eye. I realised that this would be on the afternoon, at the same time, as my friend’s party.

Now, how can I put this? Social gatherings really aren’t my thing. If I am absolutely forced to attend one of these wretched events I’ll hug a single, solitary drink, stand against a wall and attempt to understand what kind of small talk I should attempt to engage in should anyone actually bother to come and talk to me... which always proves a great waste of my speculative brain power because, after about two to three minutes, nobody ever does come and talk to me.

So, since my friends knew me and I figured they’d much rather be deprived of my less than sparkling company under such a set of circumstances, I decided to go along to Screen One of the NFT instead, just to see if the glossy, confection of a film they were purporting to be showing in any way lived up to the promise of its title and promotional paragraph.

The Tenth Victim is a science fiction film produced by Carlo Ponti and based on legendary sci-fi writer Robert Sheckley’s short story The Seventh Victim (he also wrote the novelisation of the movie version and a few sequel novels). The film is set in a world of the near future, where wars and the psychological tendencies in people that lead to them are averted by a national game where you can sign up to be, alternatively, hunter and hunted throughout your daily routine, to kill or be killed for prize money. If you make it through ten hunts, you become an international hero and win a massive money prize and all kinds of benefits. If you fail to survive ten hunts, as most people do, well... you know... you just end up dead.

The film starts with Ursula Andress playing her ninth hunt as a “hunted”, as she playfully dodges bullets and lures her hunter into a club, The Masoch Club. Piero Piccioni’s amazing and infectious score, with vocal noodlings by the singer Mina, starts right away and, though there are a lot of other melodies throughout the movie, this one keeps going through many repeat variations and plays on your subconscious at key moments. Ursula, playing American Caroline Meredith, disguisess herself as a dancer and takes out her hunter with one of several elements of this film which were used decades later in Austin Powers, International Man Of Mystery. That is to say... she blasts the hell out of her hunter with her bikini guns.

We then scoot to Italy to meet her victim, who will be her tenth, if she can kill him. This is  Marcello Mastroianni playing, um, Marcello Poletti. We are first introduced to him when his victim in the hunt is demanding his riding boots to be brought to him at a horse show. Knowing the German’s vanity, Marcello has wired the heels of his boots to explode so, when the German looks at himself in a full length mirror and clicks his heels together... BOOM!

It’s all quite delightful and the film then becomes a romp as Ursula stalks her victim to learn more of him (the rules are such that the person hunting knows everything about the victim but the hunted has to work out who is after him/her) and starts finding this poor man, who has just had his marriage annulled and doesn’t want to marry his latest lover, an interesting candidate... perhaps even for romance. However, romance comes second to becoming a “decathlete” and the film becomes a fun game of cat and mouse as Caroline attempts to lure Marcello to The Temple Of Venus in Rome in order to kill him live on television for some high paying sponsors... the makers of the popular beverage Ming Tea (and there’s another element that made it into Austin Powers, which the hero of that later film takes as the name of his pop group).

The film is spectacular. The shot compositions are very clean and show a future which is a far cry from the dust and grime of such science fiction classics as Blade Runner (reviewed here). The colours are amazing... being shot at that time when Italian films were noted for using lighting effects such as purples pitched against greens and bright yellows. It’s a truly beautiful film to look at and the mise en scene is very much like those found in the better gialli which would start to catch on before the end of the decade.

There’s also a certain sense of surrealism found within the parameters of the film as the budgets would not allow for full fledged futuristic sets. Instead, we have short cuts and metaphors which gel with the science fiction setting and these, as much as anything, truly make the film a time piece. There’s no way a premise like this would be tackled in this way now but the times then were playful enough that when one character says they survived their death because they were wearing a bullet proof skin of their own design, they can just about get away with it. It’s all very sixties... and all very entertaining. And downright stunning, as it happens.

And that score. Absolutely fantastic. A disc to take away on a desert island, for sure.

The first two things I did when I got out of the screening all those years ago were a) track down and purchase the old soundtrack album and b) add the old Anchor Bay US Region 1 DVD of this to my Christmas list pronto. I love that old Anchor Bay DVD but, it has to be said, with the film’s inaugural release in the UK from Shameless, in a dual format edition comprising both DVD and Blu Ray, the film shines now like it never has before. The transfer is absolutely stunning and the image crisp, clear and something which I suspect will get a lot of plays and, possibly, a lot of lends over the years.

Such a stunning movie and still an instant recommendation from me for anyone who is into Italian film and just drop dead gorgeous cinema in general. If you like movies, you owe it to yourself to give The 10th Victim a spin or two.

Check To The Queen (Scacco Alla Regina)

Ain’t Miss Be Slaving?

Check To The Queen (Scacco Alla Regina)
1969 Italy/West Germany
Directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile
Earls Court Collection DVD Region 0

Right. I think this is going to be one of my shorter reviews, I’m afraid.

Check To The Queen (Scacco Alla Regina) is a film of which I’d never heard of until a stall holder at a major London Film Convention recommended it to me. However, I’m pretty sure this is one of those films where the music has haunted me for quite a while now.

When I got the movie home I noticed a quite striking and what I would say is a fairly historically iconic visual image on the back cover of the front of a woman’s head projecting from a flat surface (actually a hole cut in a mirror, in the film proper). This is one of the more interesting shots from early on in this movie (although the more famous version is obviously a publicity shot) and I recognised it immediately as being the cover image for a current “best of” album for Ennio Morricone’s famous singer Edda Dell’Orso. It's also used these days as the cover of the soundtrack album. The compilation it's used on is actually called Edda Dell’Orso “Voice” and it contains a number of tracks by Morricone and other composers, including Piero Piccioni who scored this film. Check To The Queen is represented by no less than three tracks on that particular compilation. And I immediately knew from this that I was probably familiar with a lot of the music in this film already, since I have a number of Italian movie music compilations and, yeah, this film seems to get picked on a lot for those kinds of albums... and rightly so.

So, before I’d even got around to watching the movie, I put a request in to my major supplier of Italian scores and he sorted me out the expanded edition of the soundtrack, when I saw him at another film fair. I was advised that the score on this one was “really good” and, after having listened to the album a few times... I’d have to agree with that conclusion. It was also, obviously, very familiar.

But what’s the film like.

Well, there’s hardly any story and it’s the tale of a BDSM ‘D/s’ relationship between a Countess, Sylvia, who goes to work as one of the slaves of a famous film actress, Margaret. She goes there because she has strange and psychedelically lit fantasies of being whipped and humiliated by the lady in question and, once she accepts the ‘position’ given to her, most of her desires come true.

It’s fairly far ahead in terms of it’s time and the content being explored in a commercial venue such as cinema. Various forms of objectification play are indulged by the mistress before Sylvia starts to go along a path of almost topping from the bottom (in modern parlance) and as a result is auctioned off in a non-binding but ultimately worrying auction due to the tone of the film depicting the mindset of a submissive in such situations as suffering a form of mental illness which needs to be cured. Not the domination part, mind, just the submissive. I guess it was either a censorship issue or a bit of naivete at the time that any discussion of mental health rears its head at all in terms of this kind of relationship or lifestyle choice. Certain aspects of it wouldn’t be for all people in that kind of scene, I know, but it’s wrong not to be vocal about the lack of right one person or body of people has to question another person's sexual or power triggers and so forth, in that ‘closed to the general public’ lack of freedom. I thought the sixties were supposed to be a little more liberated than that. I always was, growing up in the late 60s to late 70s.

Of course, we’re not living in that kind of situation these days... oh wait... checks the clock and state of the British government and politics... oh no, the times we’re living in are much worse under a series of judgmental ruling parties who think that they know best. Thankfully, the modern BDSM community seems less judgmental about such relationships than the majority of governments... so there’s still hope that people are allowed to have any kind of Safe, Sane and Consensual relationship they want... for now.

So okay, sexual politics and power games out of the way... the film is shot really nicely. The psychedelic fantasy sequences I mentioned are heavy on the filters (to the point where some of the action is obscured or uncomfortable to look at) and there are some nice shot set ups which utilise the overemphasised vertical shapes of the mansion house in which nearly all of the movie is set. There’s a nice scene where Margaret rides a mechanical white horse (not dissimilar to the one in Korda’s The Thief Of Baghdad) which leads to some pony play fantasies in Sylvia’s head and there’s even some living statue play... Yeah. Whatever. I’m with Hot Fuzz on this one... the blight of the living statue.

And, of course, there’s Piccioni’s wonderful lounge score with Edda Dell’Orso’s amazing voice coming at you... you’re probably familiar with her from a load of Italian scores already such as A Fistful Of Dynamite and Once Upon A Time In The West and she is just as spellbinding working with Piccioni here as she is with some of the other famous composers she’s collaborated with in the past. Any film scored using her incredible vocal talents is going to elevate itself and the score glues everything together in this movie and makes it work. Even stops it becoming boring at times, which it threatens to do on a few occasions... like I said, not much happens.

I don’t think I’d recommend this film to many people, even less so to those who I know who are in the BDSM scene and who, like me, might become just a little enraged at the lack of intelligence and conscience applied to the subject matter in this particular area... which is pretty much what the movie is all about. On the other hand, the movie has some spectacular shots, competent editing, beautiful naked women and a truly classic lounge score which is obviously, due to its prominence on various compilation selections, considered very highly in the industry. So if you’re into all that stuff... yeah, give it a go.