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A blank canvas is stuck by an artist's blade, and it bleeds—surely Lucio Fulci must have recycled the terse exchange ("What are you doing?" "Painting") when defending the gore in his work. Prim wife (Florinda Bolkan) and brazen sensualist (Anita Strindberg) live side by side, the split-screen separates a quiet dinner from a raucous orgy yet fantasy mingles the two worlds. The psychoanalyst spells it out: "Your neighbor is a symbol of vice... At the same time, her freedom excites your curiosity." The "liberating dream" travels down a narrow corridors suddenly filled with nudes, pauses to contemplate Bacon portraiture, and peaks with two elongated beauties pawing each other before an invisible wind machine. Once the libertine turns up dead and the Scotland Yard inspector (Stanley Baker) starts investigating, the giallo machinery kicks into gear. The hippie scene from Blowup further withered under Italian scrutiny, London as an overcast labyrinth where psychedelic freak-outs have lost revolutionary potential and flower children play blind witnesses to the bourgeois folly of sexual repression (cf. Clouzot's La Prisonnière). Fulci's spiraling style deals in arresting shifts in space and texture: Aristocratic cottage versus makeshift commune, antiseptic institutions versus pulsating innards, a politician discreetly bailing out his daughter versus a long-haired suspect wailing "Rule Britannia" mid-interrogation. The camera zooms back from pastoral landscapes to reveal a mutilated corpse in the foreground, the chase through the bowels of a cathedral (clanging doors, scaffold, shrieking pipe organ) builds to the Hitchcockian delectation of bat after bat tangled in the heroine's tresses. "The truth comes to light in very odd colors." An absolutely astringent vision of a reptilian world, in which even reveries function not as escape but as blueprints for murder. With Jean Sorel, Leo Genn, Silvia Monti, Alberto de Mendoza, Penny Brown, and Ely Galleani.
--- Fernando F. Croce |