take 46: 4.9.2013

PAIN(TING)

A Night with Dario Argento and ?

20h30, Italy 1996, 120 min. english subs

Poster Art by malleus

Anna Manni is a policewoman trying to capture a vicious serial rapist and killer. The problem is that she suffers from "Stendhal's syndrome", a psychosomatic disease that gives her dizziness and hallucinations when she is exposed to the sight of paintings and artistic masterpieces. When the maniac lures her into a trap inside Florence's famous Uffizi museum, her troubles are just beginning...

 

The plot of this movie is hard to describe and equal parts intriguing and unpleasant. As with all Argento's thrillers, the plot is exciting and fun to guess, but it's more of a psychological drama than a crime story. Anna is almost always changing as the film progresses, both externally and internally; she starts off not knowing who she is, then she discovers who she was, remodels herself into someone else and ends up as confused as we are. Asia Argento (Dario's daughter with actress Daria Nicolodi) is iconic in the role, which is almost impossible to play – extremely physical, enigmatic and chameleon-like. She looks astonishingly like her father and she shares his artistic courage to dive into the darkest and most personal recesses of the psyche. My favourite aspect of this picture is her relationship with the many paintings – to her, they are living canvases, with characters who cry, scream and bleed (realised through excellent visual effects work by Sergio Stivaletti). The wordless opening seven minutes as she wanders through the Uffizi and her vision is assailed by the images, culminating with her literally falling into one of the paintings, is as bewitching an opening as I've ever seen, made all the more unsettling by Ennio Morricone's stunning score, featuring a hair-curling simple melody of eight minor notes. Argento's films are an acquired taste; this one features a lengthy rape and torture sequence in the middle which is hard to sit through (though not as hard as say, Frenzy or Straw Dogs), but as with all his work the film is somehow stunningly beautiful. Violence equals art. In a world of banal formulaic television designed for peons with four-second attention-spans, this is stunning cinema, regardless of moral judgements. The Stendhal Syndrome is a real psychosomatic illness, diagnosed by an Italian psychiatrist, Graziella Magherini, whose book on the subject was the primer for the intriguing script by Argento and Franco Ferrini. Shot in Rome, Florence and Viterbo.