Tag Archives: Italian

CAPSULE: ARCANA (1972)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Lucia Bosé, Maurizio Degli Esposti, Tina Aumont

PLOT: An enterprising widow and her son try to make their living practicing witchcraft.

Still from Arcana (1972)

COMMENTS: Arcana begins with a message “[t]o the spectators: this movie is not a story, but a game of cards. Both the beginning and the ending are not to be believed. You are the players. Play well and you will win.”

We open onto a busy city street; a figure emerges from a manhole cover then a group of men quickly construct a blanket fort around the hole, in which they all huddle together to observe the passers-by. I won’t spoil the ending (unbelievable as it is), because seeking out this unique movie proves to be worth the effort.

For all intents and purposes, Arcana is basically a lost film. After distributing only five prints, the production company went bankrupt and the film never made it into theaters in any major cities. Attempts to find a workable print for restoration have so far been unsuccessful. At the end of his life, even Questi himself was apparently trying to locate a copy. It’s a real shame, as Arcana reveals the obscure auteur in fine form, working again with frequent collaborator, editor and co-writer Franco ‘Kim’ Arcalli. There’s donkey levitation, frog regurgitation, and Questi’s trademark obsession with chickens and eggs, but this isn’t your typical Satanic horror film. The narrative unfolds in two parts, but as we’ve been warned, the beginning and the end are not to be believed. Is there a middle? What does it all mean? Let’s consult the cards, shall we?

Imagine I’m handing you a tarot deck – shuffle the cards thoroughly, then cut the deck into thirds. First we’ll examine the card to my left, representing the past: Death, a skeletal figure brandishing a scythe. A man known only as Tarantino has died, leaving behind his wife and son in straightened financial circumstances. Vague insinuations imply he may have been the victim of a bizarre scam. His widow (Bosé) never confirms nor denies this. She simply complains of how he left them in poverty and declares the pension checks hardly worth claiming.

The middle card reveals to us the present: mother and son riding The Wheel of Fortune, eking out their living in what at first appears as a phony psychic con, a la Nightmare Alley. Mrs. Tarantino desperately seeks wealthy clients to pay top dollar for their new-age therapy. Her son (Degli Esposti), a young man in his late teens or early twenties, grows increasingly disgusted with both his mother’s money-grubbing ways and the petty pathetic lives of their clients. He possesses actual psychic ability, but completely lacks compassion and pity. Mother agree that many of their clients are unpleasant and stupid people, but they’re also rich, so she begs her son not to frighten them away.

As the film progresses, various seekers of arcane advice consult with Mrs. Tarantino in a series of subtly surreal scenes. Red velvet curtains surround her psychic parlor, aglow with crimson lampshades in what would today be called a “ian” style. The son continues to rebel against her, interfering in their client’s lives in ever more disturbing and intrusive ways. His mother repeatedly warns him that he risks the wrath of Hell, but part one ends with a violent confrontation in which the son demands his mother reveal all her secret wisdom.

A classic Arcalli montage follows, an extended dialogue-free trance in which the mother dances with a multi-generational family all solemnly dressed in black. They move from side-to-side in unison, in slow shuffling steps, to the mesmerizing tune of a lone fiddler traversing a landscape of barren dunes. Elsewhere curious onlookers watch men with a rope pulley hoisting a donkey onto the roof of a church.

And now, the card to my right, a possible future: The Tower, a teetering structure ready to topple. Groups of armed soldiers roam the city arresting people at random. Subway laborers revolt over unsafe work conditions. An overbearing patriarch concerned with the respectability of his family, wakes in the middle of the night to find his relatives all making out with each other while the grandmother feeds upon the baby’s blood. “We make a good team,” the son tells his mother after orchestrating this last escapade, “they’re all scared shitless.” She laughs in reply.

As the two leads, Bosé and Degli Esposito both give equally intense performances despite the threadbare storyline. Aumont, as their gullible client, harbors a secret she’s afraid her fiancé will discover. As she demands to know what will happen in her future, Mrs. Tarantino becomes more and more reluctant to tell her. Her entanglement with both mother and son soon leads to tragedy.

So, what does all this Arcana mean? Have we played the game well? We may not believe in the beginning or the end, though they both present more gritty realism than the surreally fanciful middle. Or perhaps, as the mother tells the nervous young bride, there is nothing more the cards can tell us. Re-shuffle them and return them to their box, for we should prefer not to know everything.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Very weird supernatural horror movie by the maker of Death Laid an Egg.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968)

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DIRECTED BY: Elio Petri

FEATURING: Franco Nero, Vanessa Redgrave, Georges Géret, Rita Calderoni, Gabriella Boccardo

PLOT: After relocating to a run-down mansion in an attempt to recharge his imagination, a famous painter begins to suspects that the ghost of the previous owner, a beautiful young woman with nymphomaniac tendencies, may be endangering his sanity.

Still from A Quiet Place in the Country (1968)

COMMENTS: A filmmaker has to know what he’s doing when he opens a film called A Quiet Place in the Country with a cacophonous opening credit sequence, flashing snippets of famed pieces of art (which will be visually referenced throughout the film) to the sounds of percussive crashes from Ennio Morricone and the improvisational ensemble Nuova Consonanza. Sure enough, the only thing noisier than those titles is the mind of our protagonist, whom we first meet tied to a chair, nearly naked and surrounded by unnecessary electric appliances bought by his hot girlfriend. This ought to be a moment of supreme satisfaction, an introduction to someone at the top who is about to be brought low for our entertainment and edification. But Leonardo, the handsome and successful painter with money and public adulation and said hot girlfriend, is already in free fall. The point of the movie is to show how much further he’s going to go.

Nero plays a man in the grip of maddening dissatisfaction. He’s stricken with a drought of creativity; the works he produces are dissonant blotches of color, and he seeks inspiration in images of war, famine, and smut. His libido is barely under control: he molests women on the street (or imagines he does) and he greedily collects skin mags at the local newsstand despite knowing that Redgrave (arguably looking as beautiful and certainly as overtly sexual as she had ever been on film) is waiting at home for him. He’s desperately seeking something, and it isn’t until he comes across a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of the city that he gets anywhere close to figuring out what it is.

Did I mention that A Quiet Place in the Country is a giallo? The house contains a supernatural murder mystery, with the previous tenant allegedly gunned down during the war, but the townsfolk may be keeping some secrets about her, especially the old groundskeeper. Leonardo’s obsession with the woman leads him to have bloody, violent thoughts that he doesn’t do a great job of keeping in check. The threats only grow, while Leonardo’s grip on his sanity slips. He attacks a photographer, he terrifies his live-in housekeeper (although he seems to accept her absurd assertion that the young man sharing her bed is her little brother come to keep her company), and he grows ever more paranoid about his girlfriend Flavia. He dreams of her killing him, and sees visions of her everywhere he goes, often pushing him around immobilized in a wheelchair. By the time insanity erupts into violence, it seems inevitable.

Perhaps that’s what leaves me cold about A Quiet Place in the Country. Director Petri (whose work I have reviewed previously) has unquestionably put together an efficient piece of shock cinema with a highbrow veneer. But because Leonardo seems pretty unstable from the outset, there’s not really any suspense or surprise in his story. He’s like a jack-in-the-box: you know he’ll pop, and it’s only a question of when. And because we are rooted in his point of view, the twist ending loses a lot of its punch. Rather than recontextualizing all that has come before, it just reinforces the fact that we’ve been watching everything through the lens of a crazy person. That makes A Quiet Place in the Country an interesting piece of art, even unique. But it doesn’t linger. Once it’s through, we’re on to the next piece in the gallery.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the weirder, more vaguely satirical contemporaries of Argento’s definitive Italian post-BLOW-UP giallo; it’s the brother, not the son, the cool uncle the Argento generation never sees anymore except on rare holidays when they can get away to visit him at the ‘funny’ farm… It defies expectations for a giallo while riffing on them in a deadpan absurdist abstraction that puts it more aligned with Spasmo and nothing else.” – Erich Kuersten, Acidemic Journal of Film and Media

(This movie was nominated for review by joe gideon. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

366 UNDERGROUND: THE OTHER DIMENSION (1992)

L’altra dimensione

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DIRECTED BY: Fabio Salerno

FEATURING: Francesco Rinaldi, Maddalena Vadacca; Luigi Sgroi, Nadia Rebeccato, Piero Belloto; Marco Monzani, Giorgia Chezzi

PLOT: In this horror anthology, a man plots abduction of the woman who’s left him, another plots possession of a woman who’s leaving him, and a third plots incorporation of a woman who’s no longer living.

COMMENTS: Three short films await us, projected in a dingy, dark room. Dust-covered sound equipment, cobwebbed film reels, and a menacing tinge of green fill the narrow screen, as an unseen entity inquires, “How many of you have found yourself the subject of incredible stories?” The Other Dimension spools out like miniature theater event: two shorts preceding a near-feature.

Salerno kicks off with “Delirium”, a fun variant of the “Bluebeard” folktale. Simply constructed, the segment features clever lighting, with the unearthly sparkles of the protagonist’s whiskey and glass capturing the titular condition, and giallo greens exuding organic menace. The film’s frame is put to compelling use as our angular stalker’s and victim’s fates collide. Most troublingly, Salerno manages an abstract, and impressively brief visual metaphor for rape, whose beauty left me quite unnerved. Closing with a shot of three heads by a bottle of Pepsi, Salerno wraps up the action and we are quickly brought to the squabbling exes of “Mortal Instinct.” The title is a bit heavy-handed, but the second short (the weakest of the three) goes by quickly enough. But not before it makes some remarks on machismo by way of Black Magic—with a bodily destruction sequence that may not appear realistic, but somehow manages to be ickily convincing nevertheless.

The main course of The Other Dimension, “Eros e Thanatos (Love & Death)”, shows off Salerno’s talents about as far as his means could allow. Some fifty minutes in length, its story of decayed love rotting into aberrant obsession left me, against considerable odds, wishing for a happy ending to fall upon the quiet protagonist. Judicious montage, narration, and, once again, a keen eye for lighting simultaneously showed how cleverly this was made—and how inexpensively. The lead actor, Marco Monzani, never plays a note wrong, whether he’s awkwardly paying the cabbie to get his ex-girlfriend moving on her way, or taking her by the hand as she emerges from the grave. “Eros e Thanatos” lies somewhere between Angst and After Hours, and its action, though scant, floats by on gusts of a sickly-sweet breeze.

Stumbling into this experience with no information beyond “low budget”, “Italian”, “horror”, and the IMDb filmmaker overview’s sole blurb, “Died 1993 · Milan, Italy (suicide)”, I really didn’t know what to expect from this, but it was certainly not that The Other Dimensions would have such impressive flashes of on-screen poetry. To the best of my knowledge, Fabio Salerno is a name known only to a small subsection of horror buffs. This final offering, completed not long before his death at the age of thirty-one, clearly shows that the world of cinema lost a promising voice far too soon.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[I]t’s a heck of a wild ride if you love scrappy homemade horror.” — Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital (Blu-ray)

CAPSULE: LA CHIMERA (2023)

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La Chimera is currently available to purchase on VOD (more rental/streaming options available later).

DIRECTED BY: Alice Rohrwacher

FEATURING: Josh O’Connor, Carol Duarte,

PLOT: An Englishman in Italy with a mystical talent for discovering burial plots joins a group who traffic in ancient Etruscan artifacts while brooding over his lost love.

Still from La Chimera (2023)

COMMENTS: If nothing else, La Chimera‘s milieu is unique: a ragtag gang of modern tomb raiders, trading in a black market for Etruscan artifacts. We first meet Arthur (a slovenly, rakishly melancholy Josh O’Connor) in mid-dream, as he remembers the woman whose absence will lurk in the background of the rest of the picture like a ghost. Arthur, an Englishman who speaks passable Italian, has just been released from jail, and he soon reluctantly returns to his gang and their old racket: digging up ancient pottery for resale on the black market. They need Arthur because of his preternatural ability to locate old burial grounds, which he can do with a diving rod like he was dowsing for water. The crew is motivated by money, but Arthur, we are told, investigates the tombs because he believes he can find a legendary door that leads to the afterlife. Besides his crew, Arthur hangs out with Flora (Rosselini), an old friend who lives in a decaying villa. There he meets the oddly-named Italia (Duarte), a tone-deaf maid who shows an interest in the handsome brooding stranger. Will she be able to spark new life in him, or will he continue descending into graves?

La Chimera is a European-style drama, more focused on character than plot. It wanders about, in no hurry to get to the point, but rather allowing us to soak in the characters for 130 minutes. Rohrwacher enlivens the stroll with assays into multiple (not always congruent) styles, including a smattering of magical realist touches. She provides changes in film stocks, digital undercranking for comic montages, fourth wall breaks, a Felliniesque festival where the gang’s males dress in drag, an outlaw folk song about the “tombaroli” (grave robbers), and an affecting dream on a train where Arthur faces up to some supernatural ethical dilemmas. There is also a repeated vertical pan that always ends with O’Connor upside-down, to simulate the vertigo that accompanies a successful divination. But despite these touches, La Chimera hews close to the standard art-house drama formula. It is, to a large extent, a meditation on death; with tomb-raiding as a plot point, it would have to be. But it seems somewhat unsure as to what it wants to say on the topic. Arthur struggles with a death wish, which is something of an addiction for him, so perhaps it’s an ersatz cinematic take on Keats: “Ode on an Etruscan Urn.”

La Chimera has been receiving near universal praise from critics, as did Rohrwacher’s previous magical realist drama, Happy as Lazzaro. I must confess that the director hasn’t won me over yet, and I have difficulty figuring out what all the fuss is about. She’s a  craftswoman who wields cinematic techniques competently, but with no strong auteurial stamp. That’s not to say her films aren’t thoughtful and well put together; they just fail to stand out from the art-house pack.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Strange, aesthetically gorgeous and profound, La Chimera is ultimately just as unknowable as the liminal space that it protagonist inhabits within it.”–Tanner Gordon, Spectrum Culture (contemporaneous)