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.

Stratton

Stratton ‘til Morning

Stratton
2017 UK Directed by Simon West
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some very minor spoilerage in this one.

I always find Simon West a bit hit and miss as a director, to be honest. I hadn’t thought too much of the Stratton trailer when I saw it a few weeks ago but was willing to give it a try because I quite like Dominic Cooper and it’s rare that I actually get to see him headlining a movie... especially an action movie, no less. I loved him as the vampire turned hunter in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (reviewed here), for instance. Stratton is based on the main character from the majority of Duncan Falconer’s novels and is a bit of a stand in for Falconer himself, who modelled the character after his time in the Special Boat Service of the Royal Navy (basically the Navy’s version of the SAS). However, I don’t think this movie is based on any of the specific Stratton novels, or they would have been more forthcoming with a ‘based on’ credit at least somewhere (although I could be wrong).

Now, it has to be said that the film has had some pretty awful word of mouth and, to be fair, it does have its problems but the film is not too bad if you don’t mind the action sequences seeming a bit lacking in this one. Of course, you could argue it’s an action film but, to avoid disappointment, you might want to tell yourself it’s a secret agent film with some action sequences thrown in. Either way, if you’re going for the action you might want to have a little rethink as no reviewer, I would imagine, would call this ‘high octane’ stuff. However, like I said, it’s not too bad.

The film opens strongly with two agents, one of whom is Dominic Cooper as Stratton, as they go through an underwater tube/pipe system to penetrate a ‘secret lair’ but the mission goes horribly wrong due to incorrect intel and also the fact that “the bad guys” knew they were coming. This opening sequence, following on from some nicely designed main titles, is quite suspenseful and everything you could want it to be... up until a point. That point being when the two agents leave the tube system and find themselves in an empty complex with the object of their mission already snaffled by the bad guys, a load of dead workers and a load of gunmen standing between them and their extraction point. It’s here that the inadequacy of the budget (which I assume was low on the evidence of the resulting film) seems to sink in and things get less exciting. For instance, when Stratton lets off all the charges that he and his fellow agent have planted in the ‘is it a secret lair or... what the heck is it’ place, well... we had indoor fireworks once, when I was a kid and, to be honest, they had more of a bang than the sad, little explosion that occurs here.

And that’s the real big problem with this film... the action sequences. I don’t know if the stunts and effects work in this were affected by a terribly low budget, as I imagine it to be, or were just not very well conceived. The case could be made that the dialogue scenes leading up to and around those ‘not quite set pieces’ are actually quite good (although a little predictable) but I did think the writers did well in painting some nice little portraits of the lead character and his team.

Of course, the actors here more than pull their weight with that dialogue, with Cooper ably supported by Derek Jacobi as his ‘boat life friend’ as well as Connie Nielsen, who I’d recently seen as Queen Hippolyta in Wonder Woman (reviewed here), a role she will be reprising in the upcoming Justice League movie, by the looks of things. Here, she plays Stratton’s boss and the dynamic is like a slightly more active version of the Judi Dench version of M from the Bond films but it kinda works and I was quite impressed how the character didn’t do the obvious things like reprimanding the team for the various shenanigans that they botch up during their missions and she seemed like a really fair boss to work for, I’d have to say. Also, watch out for a lady on Stratton’s team called Aggy... she is played here by an actress called Gemma Chan and she’s one of those people who dominates the screen whenever she’s on. I wouldn’t be surprised if some director cottons on to this in future and she starts getting some major league roles (fingers crossed).

Cooper himself is okay in the lead role but I just didn’t really believe him as the kind of action man the writers wanted me to think of him as. I know Henry Cavill dropped out a week before shooting this and I wonder how tailored the role was to that actor. I do know Cooper looks uncannily like GI Joe in this one than was too close for comfort. And by that I mean the specific English character called GI Joe. To explain, as a child no kid had the internet or even much of a hint as to what was going on in the rest of the world in the same period of history other than what they caught on TV so we weren’t really aware of global, alternative brand names. In England, the American GI Joe line was manufactured by Palitoy and known over here, quite affectionately by people of a certain age, as Action Man. However, one of the 'action men' had a scruffy looking beard and that one was known as GI Joe. And it’s this scruffy beard that both Dominik Cooper and his new work partner, played by Austin Stowell, are wearing in this movie as they pursue the bad guy played by Thomas Kretschmann and... I don’t know, it was almost a ‘comedy’ beard as far as I was concerned. I don’t think it helps make Dominic Cooper look like a ‘manly man’s man’ at all and it kind of slips into the realm of camp humour at certain points. Ah well, at least his beard and moustache didn’t get better lines than he did and, despite this slight problem, Mr. Cooper still does a fantastic and believable job with his character so... not complaining too much.

The score, by the way, by Nathaniel Méchaly, is absolutely superb and plays just like the score to a modern Bond movie, only better. It seems to be used a lot in an almost inappropriately up tempo style to make the scenes somehow play faster than they actually are and I couldn’t help but think of a young Elmer Bernstein employing the same tactic to speed up the pacing of The Magnificent Seven all those decades ago. Méchaly does some really good work here and I truly think EON productions should give this one a listen and maybe give him a shot at the next Bond film because, quite frankly, he’s already doing it here. This stuff is in a way different ball park from his earlier scores for the Taken trilogy, for sure. Such a shame, then, that the score is unavailable to buy at the time of writing this review. A nice CD of this would not go amiss.

But like I said, the action is a bit of a problem here. Other action movies might end with a shoot out or chase on a cruise liner or an aircraft or with a big building going boom... this one has a double decker bus chase. Not that I’m knocking the ability of the humble double decker bus to take part in action movies, after all we’ve seen the effectiveness of said transportation in both Live And Let Die (reviewed here) and The Mummy Returns. It has to be said, though, the ending of this movie falls a little shy of spectacular and the post-action scene stab at the possibility of a future romance in Stratton’s life seems like such an afterthought that it’s a little laughable. Also, there’s a twist with one of the characters which is revealed about half way through but, even though I had no clue there should be a twist, I figured out that there would be because one of the characters seemed a little too shady. Which is bizarre but I saw it coming from the opening sequence onwards in terms of the identity of the ‘mole’ in the department so, yeah, not so well played by the writers, on that one, I felt.

All in all, Stratton is not a bad movie... just a little flat. In fact, what it reminded me of mostly was of a really great 'made for TV' movie of the 1970s where they got everything right. It’s just not what I would expect to see being touted in a modern cinema setting. More like an extended episode of The Professionals than something the big leaguers would be knocking out. That being said, I did find it quite enjoyable and diverting so I’ve really no complaints and it genuinely doesn’t deserve the negative attention it’s been getting, that’s for sure. So... see it if you like to watch the odd bit of adventure storytelling and you don’t mind if the action choreography seems a little tame in places. There have been worse movies thrust onto an unsuspecting public this year.

Dario Argento's DRACULA

Tooth High To A Grasshopper

Dario Argento's Dracula
2012 USA
Directed by Dario Argento
Sony Italian BluRay Region A,B & C 

Dario Argento is a bit of a legend of a movie director these days... and rightly so, having stolen Mario Bava’s thunder somewhat when, in 1969, he repopularised (and how) the Italian giallo thriller single handedly with the first of many spectacular gialli which he made over the decades, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. The director is mostly a practitioner of this form of cinema although, since people often find themselves confused between movies depicting serial killers and movies depicting monsters, he is often misconceived as being primarily a director of horror films.

It’s true, of course, that Argento has directed both films and TV episodes which fall into the horror genre, including one of his most famous films, Suspiria. However, his horror direction is only a small body of work compared to his giallo output and should never, I believe, be considered his primary voice... although he is obviously inspired by both a sense of the gothic (instilled in him by some of the writers he used to read when he was ill in bed as a child, if memory serves) and the famous cinematic forays of the past which encapsulated that very atmosphere as their primary focus (with offerings from Universal, RKO, Hammer and the like).

I first got into Argento at the dawn of DVDs when, after about a year or two of the machines being on the market, I finally bit the bullet and bought a player primarily because I found out you could get American DVDs of the Flash Gordon serials. This was important stuff. Of course, owning a multi-region DVD player, like pretty much anybody who is serious about film in my country would, opened up a wealth of possibilities and suddenly more controversial directors who were either not allowed to have films released in my country or were heavily censored over here (which amounts to the same thing... who wants to see a censored version of a movie?) were now instantly accessible to people in the UK properly for the first time. Which is why, I think, genres such as the giallo, the spaghetti western, sexploitaiton, blaxploitation, nunsploitation and pretty much every other kind of interesting genre around have found a big resurgence in popularity... people now have relatively easy access to these kinds of movies.

Argento, it has to be said, has been producing films which have been less than popular with his fans of recent years, although I have no problem with most of them... my one caveat being his awful version of The Phantom Of The Opera (which isn’t a recent one, as it happens). I remember being in a packed Fright Fest screening of his previous film Giallo and the audience, in which there were undoubtedly a lot of Argento fans, was howling with collective laughter at some of the execution of the movie. Now I saw no real problem with, most, of it... but I’ve always thought of Argento as primarily a visual and aural stylist, which makes sense seeing as he comes from a background of churning out very successful gialli. These films are not about acting or their ludicrous scripts... they’re about visual style and great music. So I really don’t have the same kinds of issues as some people do with his later stuff (like The Card Player, for example, which I loved).

His version of Dracula, of course, is obviously a horror story but, although it has a certain sense of a thread of adaptation running through it, it changes things around sufficiently from both Stoker’s original novel and stage play versions (and, of course, the later stage adaptations which Universal studios culled their original version from) to be different enough for even the most jaded fans to find something fresh in the story. I suspect the location budget also had something to do with that (it’s all set in one village) but even so, there are some interesting things going on here. Carfax Abbey is mentioned as Carfax Sanitorium, for example, which was formerly run by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Dr. Seward is completely written out).

Does this make for a good movie then?

Well... yes and no. I think it’s all down to how much certain outrageous ingredients spoil the main course for you. There was one point about a quarter of an hour before the end, for example, when I started laughing out loud.

Now then, the acting by a lot of the cast is not up to scratch. You expect that from an Argento movie and it shouldn’t, in itself, be a problem if you are already used to this director’s work. However, surprisingly, there is also some pretty good acting in this one too. The director’s daughter, Asia Argento, can always be relied on to give a great performance (and on the strength of the one movie I saw that she directed, I suspect she might even be a better director than her old man... the talent runs in the family) but we also have Thomas Kretschmann giving a really great performance as Dracula and Rutger Hauer making a more than competent Van Helsing... although Dracula’s nemesis doesn’t actually turn up until the last part of the film.

Added to this you have Dario Argento’s trademark visual splendour and the shot design and camera motion through those shots is absolutely superb in this one. The striking use of Bavaesque colour is again pushed to the fore and the outrageously saturated pools of red and yellow light sharing the same frame and the greener than green forest in the moonlight are all things of beauty. If nothing else... this film is quite spectacular. There are also a few good doses of female nudity too, which is unusual for this director and, I think, is probably more on show here (albeit briefly) than all of his other movies combined. That, of course, adds its own kind of spectacle into the proceedings... especially lit and shot as well as it is.

That being said... there’s quite a lot of bad stuff here too. One of which is Argento’s fascination with style over substance. I remember, decades ago, Argento was asked in a documentary if, when faced with the insertion of a cool and beautiful shot in his movie as opposed to a shot which would be more appropriate and make total sense within a story, which he would choose. Argento said he would always take the cool shot over logic any day. Dracula is full of “the cool shot” which is a trademark of Argento, to be sure, including one where you see the course of a bullet as it travels from the base of a man’s jaw and up and out through the top of his head... not as audacious as the notorious “bullet scene” from Argento’s movie Opera but certainly an echo throughout the years. However, you also have one scene near the end, the one I started laughing at, where the movie totally “jumps-the-shark” as it were, in modern pop culture parlance...

Dracula, it seems, can transform himself into any kind of beast he wants. One would think he would be fairly subtle in his choice perhaps but, no, he decides to go and kidnap Mina Harker transformed as a giant sized, bright green CGI grasshopper which, while certainly giving the movie a sudden and fierce injection of 1950s B-movie atmosphere... seemed perhaps a fair bit inappropriate given the sombre tone of the rest of the movie and its leanings towards the gothic. This was a fairly unfortunate choice, it has to be said, but taken out of context it looks pretty cool, at least.

But there’s more.

The various “myths” of the vampire are neither adhered to faithfully nor ignored. One or the other or the popular tactic of establishing which of the various trappings are being used would have been a way to go. Set up your ground rules for the audience first. Here, it’s contradictory and, well... all over the shop to be honest. One minute, Jonathan Harker (very much tapping into the pretty boy Keanu Reeves vibe of Coppola’s version of the story) is bitten and is instantly allergic to deadly sunlight... the next we are introduced to the “Renfield” character stand-in, who is also obviously a vampire, but who has no problem with strolling around in sunlight at all. Similarly, Lucy (beautifully played by Asia) is committing her undead crimes at night and sleeping in her tomb by day (just as her master Dracula is sleeping in his protective coffin) but why then is it, when the count himself turns into another creature, he’s perfectly fine running around in the sunlight? None of this makes much sense and neither does the fact that a bitten Jonathan Harker needs to feel the sharp end of Van Helsing’s stake but the equally vamped up Mina Harker doesn’t. None of it makes much sense... which is a big shame, to be honest.

Also, there is a dreadful reliance on CGI blood effects for the trademark Argento gore in this movie and, to me, this just looks awful when compared to a plain, in camera, practical effect. Maybe Argento’s resorted to this finally because of something to do with the 3D process... I don’t know. However, it looks very fake and unsatisfying and I hope he doesn’t continue to go down this route.

However, I let none of this detract from my enjoyment of the film, to be sure. And there are some nice nods both to the original Stoker novel (Kretschmann crawling up the outside of the castle wall) and to Todd Browning’s 1931 version, with both a large spider’s web and the full Lugosi treatment as Kretschmann digs in to the well worn “children of the night" dialogue. And, of course, Rutger Hauer’s impromtu holy cross assembly will bring back fond memories of Peter Cushing’s more succesful attempt in the old Hammer version. So some nice stuff too, including the music...

After the problems Argento had convincing the studio to retain his regularly composer, and once figurehead of Goblin, Claudio Simonetti on the previous project (the final score to Giallo was by Marco Werba), Simonetti has returned to Argento’s side with a brilliant, theremin tinged score which is quite remarkable in tone, although one of the sub-themes did remind me a little of the theme which the group Toto allegedly pilfered for their score for Dune, namely Ronald Stein’s score for Roger Corman’s Haunted Palace. That minor gripe aside though, I’ve been enjoying the score for a year or so now on CD and am pleased to finally be able to hear it in the context of the movie for which it was written. This includes the end title song which is performed by Simonetti’s current progressive rock group Daemonia.

Dario Argento’s Dracula, when all is said and done, is a film which I am more than happy to have in my possession and will definitely get a few spins as the years go by. Perhaps it may be a bit anticlimactic for some to realise that such a legendary director tackling such a legendary story is not without its problems but I, for one, am happy with the result (grasshopper aside) and, to be honest, it’s a lot better than I’d hoped it would be after the feedback I got from some. It looks, like usual for this country, I won’t get a chance to see it in any kind of cinema release over here in its 3D version but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed.

Oh yeah. About the 3D. If you are buying the Italian Blu Ray of the film (which is shot and presented in the English language anyway, by the way) then you will be shelling out a lot more for the 3D version of the movie than the 2D version, if you have a 3D player. Not to worry though... as the stall holder who I bought this from pointed out to me, the 3D print of the movie is also on the 2D disc, they’ve just repackaged the same disc for the more expensive version to get some extra cash. So if you buy the Blu Ray standard edition, at least on the version I have, you’ll get both versions. Watch out for those large, heaving bosoms in the 3D version though! You might get a wallop.