BY TODD GARBARINI
The
year 1976 was a phenomenal time for films that went into production. George
Lucas’s space opera, Star Wars, began
principal photography in March; Steven Spielberg, fresh off the success of Jaws, was given carte blanche to bring Close
Encounters of the Third Kind to the screen and began shooting in May; and
Dario Argento, who became emboldened by the financial success of his latest and
arguably best film to date, Profundo
Rosso (known in the U.S. as Deep Red),
embarked upon Suspiria, a murder
mystery involving a dance academy hiding in plain sight while doubling as a
home to a coven of witches, which began filming in July. Suspiria is
just one of a handful of films directed by Signor Argento over a fifty-plus
year career, and it’s also being showcased in full-blown 4K Digital Cinema
Projection as part of the sinisterly titled Beware of Dario Argento: A
20-Film Retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater in New York City now through
June 29th. You can see the full calendar at this link here. The one omission from the roster of
titles is his 2009 thriller Giallo, starring Adrien Brody, which was
stopped from being released due to the actor’s failure to be paid for his role
until he successfully sued the producers.
Beginning
on Friday, June 17th, the first film shown in the retrospective was
his debut outing, the phenomenal The Bird With the Crystal Plumage from
1970, lensed by straordinario cineasta Vittorio Storaro, on a double
bill with his equally fine thriller Tenebre/Tenebrae from 1982. Bird
is amazing in that it was the first film that he ever directed…ever.
There were no interminable student films made prior to it. Somehow, following
his years as a newspaper film critic and having contributed to the 1968 western
Once Upon a Time in the West, he made a visually dazzling cinematic yarn
loosely inspired by Fredric Brown’s 1949 novel The Screaming Mimi (itself
made into the 1958 film of the same title by Gerd Oswald starring Anita Ekberg),
though there are also some similarities to the creepy 1949 “Birdsong for a
Murderer” episode of the Inner Sanctum radio drama that starred the late
great Boris Karloff.
The
standout in this series is clearly Suspiria, with its amazingly bright
color palette and virtuoso camerawork. Also of note, at least for die-hard
Argento completists, is his sole non-thriller/horror outing, the 1973 Italian
comedy set during the Italian Revolution of 1848 called The Five Days (Le
Cinque Giornate) shot by cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller who would go on to lens Deep
Red (Profondo Rosso) (1975). While available on Youtube in Italian,
this is an extremely rare presentation of the film with English subtitles –
restored in 4K to boot. It’s also quite funny; not on the level of the Pink
Panther films, but enough to elicit audible chuckles. The seldom-seen Inferno
(1980), his beautiful follow-up to Suspiria, will also be shown, the sole
title to be showcased in 35mm.
The
Italian Maestro appeared in-person at several of the screenings over the
weekend, most notably on Sunday in a Q & A session emceed by Argento expert
Maitland McDonagh, the author of the excellent book Broken Mirrors/Broken
Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, originally published in 1991. Following
the sold-out screening of his 1985 film Phenomena, a phantasmagorical fairytale/murder
mystery that was presented to an audience of mostly younger fans who, judging
by their applause and reactions to the film, were new to it. The plot of Phenomena
has long been the subject of ridicule and derision by critics and fans alike
since its initial release. The inevitable complaints about the film range from
the bad dubbing and stiff performances. If the film’s title does not sound
familiar, that could be attributed to the fact that Phenomena was severely cut by 34 minutes and retitled Creepers when it opened in the States on
Friday, August 30, 1985. Fortunately, the 116-minute cut of the film was shown.
Signor Argento responded through an
interpreter to Ms. Donagh’s questions about the film.
Maitland McDonagh: I've always thought that Phenomena was extraordinary
because it's a story that is sort of both a cross between the operatic and the
fairy tale. Dario, what were the origins of Phenomena?
Dario Argento: I was on vacation with my mother on a small
island, and we were listening to Radio Monte Carlo. There was a person telling
a story about how in Germany they had discovered that by examining insects,
they could discover when a person had died. I was very struck by
this and when I returned to Rome, I went to see an entomologist and asked
him how this was possible. He told me, for example, that if somebody fired a
gun off in a room full of insects, that the insects would die. He also
explained that for a whole series of reasons, that it would be possible to
identify a person’s exact date of death using insects, which is described in-depth
in the film.
MM: The insects are one of the most remarkable parts of this film.
Working with them must have been a great challenge. How did you work with your
crew and your on-set insect experts to get the insects to almost be their own
characters in their own right?
DA: For this movie, I needed thousands of flies. I rented a small
theater and completely sealed it off. I put some fly larvae in there and every
week I would throw some raw meat in the room. Eventually, after several
weeks, they turned into a mass of flies that just went after the actor the way
that we had intended and that’s how we shot the end of the film. The insects in
the scenes with Donald Pleasence, who plays the entomologist, were all
manipulated by insect handlers on the set and through editing.
MM: One of the things that really struck me after having viewed this
film after many years, was that it tells the story of two abandoned females.
First, there is Jennifer Corvino played by Jennifer Connelly, whose mother
leaves the family on a Christmas morning, and her father is currently away
shooting a movie in the Philippines, unable to be reached by telephone. The
other female is Inga, the chimpanzee, who loses her friend, played wonderfully
by Donald Pleasence.
DA: Tanga, the chimpanzee who plays Inga in the film, suffered greatly from the loss of
her friend (the Donald
Pleasence character) halfway through shooting. She escaped from the
set. We were working and shooting right near a large forest, and she went into
that forest for almost three days. As
you can well imagine, she became very hungry and so the forest rangers put out
some food and they were able to lure her back out. Tanga was a
remarkable creature; I would tell her what to do and she would simply do it. I
recall that in the film there is a scene where she must break up the wooden
slats on the shutters in order to get into her friend’s house. I showed her how
to do it, and she did it exactly how I showed her. Jennifer Corvino is also a very sad character.
Even though a lot of her classmates must think that she’s so lucky to have this
famous father for an actor, she’s very much alone and off by herself. Because
of this, she becomes prey to a very evil person. This is the story that I
wanted to tell, the loneliness of a young girl. This was a girl that was my
daughter’s age at the time. Jennifer Connelly was thirteen when she played this
role, and she did it with a tremendous amount of elegance.
MM: I also
love the way that you use the Swiss locations in the film, especially the trees
and the wind. They really work well in conveying the mindset of the characters
and the larger forces of nature that are at work.
DA: I have
the character of the professor talk about the foehn, the wind in the Swiss Alps,
with the link into the insects. At the very start of the film, where we see the
trees and the wind, there is this little house set against this vast landscape.
It looks like something right out of a fairy tale, sort of like a gingerbread
house. This young Danish tourist who is accidentally abandoned by her tourist
bus, is all alone in the midst of this panorama of forests, mountains and trees.
There’s this awful thing that is about to happen. The girl who plays her is my
first daughter, Fiore Argento. I really studied for this film very thoroughly.
I put a lot of time and effort into it. I did my best to create this, as you so
put it, operatic fairytale. I did it with great love, and I especially
appreciate the wonderful performance by Jennifer Connelly and what she had to
offer. She was thirteen years-old when we shot the film. This was her first big
movie, and I was just dazzled by her beauty, her intelligence, and her grace.
Dark
Glasses
The
evening was rounded out with the premiere of his new film Dark Glasses (Occhiali
Neri), his first film in ten years, and while it fails to crack the Top Ten
Best Argento Flicks list, it’s still worth seeing in a theater. It was shot in mid-2021
in Italian and has English subtitles. Written over twenty years ago and
consigned to a drawer in 2002 after the financier went bankrupt and ended up in
prison, Dark Glasses was resurrected by his daughter, actress Asia
Argento, who stumbled across the script, read it, and urged him to make it. Described
as a “tender thriller”, this is highly misleading as there is a fair amount of
brutal violence and explicit gore, far more than anything seen in Profondo
Rosso, Suspiria, Tenebrae, Phenomena, or even Opera
– arguably the last truly great film he has made – the films often cited as his
most violent and most censored. If I had to compare Dark Glasses to
anything in his filmography of the past 35 years following Opera, it
would be Sleepless (Non Ho Sonno) (2001).
Diana
(Ilenia Pastorelli) is a matter-of-fact prostitute who finds herself blinded in
an accident caused by a maniac out to kill women in her line of work. Her
misfortune puts her in contact with a young orphaned Asian boy named Chin
(Andrea Zhang) as well as a woman named Rita from the Association for the Blind
and Visually Impaired (Asia Argento, in a refreshingly realistic and subdued
performance, with her own voice to boot!) who works with people to help them
get on with their lives. There is also a seeing-eye dog who comes to the rescue
to help our protagonists out of danger. While some of the plot points feel a
little silly and predictable, the film possesses an extremely atmospheric score
by Arnaud Rebotini. Missing from the film are the very directorial flourishes
that fans have come to love and expect from the Maestro’s golden era, his
genius method of cinematically propelling a story forward with astonishing set
pieces: there are no cameras booring into brains or over buildings, or
excessive jump-cuts, etc. The film boasts a decent performance from Ilenia
Pastorelli and young Andrea Zhang whose characterization of Chin is ultimately
sympathetic as the Mandarin youth the audience roots for. One of the director’s
shortest films at just 90 minutes give or take, the lack of visual splendor may
be a result of the director’s getting on in years – he is currently 81 – and
unwillingness to perform time-consuming set-ups. Or it may be having to make a
film on a smaller budget.
Once
wonders what fate has befallen the director’s as-yet-unfilmed project, The
Sandman, first announce in the fall of 2014. As of this writing, there is
still no word on it, however in the meantime, Dark Glasses fits the bill
as a bright spot in the director’s later filmography.