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"You got that feeling, didn't you?" Visit to the museum, as Nabokov would say, the feint is on De Palma's Dressed to Kill, Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia is the true basis. Botticelli's Venus and Caravaggio's Medusa and Bruegel's Icarus in vertiginous succession, thus the Roman detective (Asia Argento) seized by the titular malady at a Florentine gallery in one of Dario Argento's grandest displays of perilous intoxication. A motel copy of Rembrandt's Night Watch melts into a portal to a crime scene to reveal her mission, the serial rapist and killer she's after (Thomas Kretschmann) promptly materializes. "I know you're always on my side." The swooning dazzle yields to cold terror, words from the author of Le Rouge et le Noir lend voice to the protagonist's trauma, "Ah! si je pouvais oublier..." The immersions of art and the violations of flesh, Argento's starkest vision. Ravishing frescoes give way to monstrous graffiti in the bound heroine's mind, the murderer conquered and battered and kicked into the river is not yet gone. "I feel myself changing," raven tresses sheared off and replaced with a blonde wig glint the superfices of bottomless pain. (Her own therapeutic canvases showcase only engulfing gapes.) The hapless colleague (Marco Leonardi) recommends Buster Keaton comedies and gets mock-buggered for his trouble, the Gallic aesthete (Julien Lambroschini) offers himself as comfort only to end up as bloody splatter on classical marble. The Silence of the Lambs is taken stock of, a purposeful ugliness reigns down to the CGI bullet that tears through a shrieking mouth, Giuseppe Rotunno dutifully unlearns everything he knows about beauty. A merciless spiral, set to Ennio Morricone's aching ostinato. "I didn't mean to scare you." "Everything scares me." The closing image crystallizes the kinship with Polanski's Repulsion. With Luigi Diberti, Paolo Bonacelli, Franco Diogene, John Quentin, Sonia Topazio, Lucia Stara, Lorenzo Crespi, and Veronica Lazar.
--- Fernando F. Croce |