The directors of 'Amer', Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, pay homage to classic Italian genre cinema. Their latest work pays tribute to a Diabolik-style hero, recalling the highlights of his career.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then every frame of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's kaleidoscopic film, “Reflection in a Dead Diamond,” is worth its weight in cubic zirconia. This new visual explosion from the French duo responsible for “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears” continues their pop-art adoration of 1960s cult cinema, a guilty pleasure for many. This time, their main inspiration is the fumetti neri, the Italian pulp comics that gave rise to the masked character of Diabolik and a stylish (though sometimes questionable in taste) subgenre of crime and adventure films, mostly James Bond imitations with a visual aesthetic reminiscent of giallo.
Directors: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Writers: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Stars: Fabio Testi, Manon Beuchot, Yannick Renier
“Reflection” asks what a life of world-saving exploits, as depicted in film and comics, would look like in retrospect, as a Bond-like secret agent gazes out at the sea and watches his life flash before his eyes. The answer: objects are much closer than they appear, but also fragmented like broken glass. In the film's second shot, the eyes of Italian actor Fabio Testi fill the widescreen, an even more dramatic (but less impactful, without the proper build-up or suspense) presentation than Charles Bronson's first appearance, looking up from his harmonica, in “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
Sergio Leone was a better director than those who made most of these films (though Mario Bava's legendary 1968 “Danger: Diabolik” remains a mod delight), but it's the audacious staging of the entire movement that captivates Cattet and Forzani. Clearly, they are also fans of spy film clichés, such as sports cars with headlights that fire machine guns, “Mission: Impossible”-style rubber masks, and an X-ray ring that allows one to see through walls (and the backs of poker cards to read the opponent's hand), all of which feature prominently.
At the beginning, they even pay homage to the iconic opening credit sequences of the early James Bond films, created by Robert Brownjohn, with suggestive silhouettes and images projected onto body parts. Like Quentin Tarantino, Cattet and Forzani are pastiche artists: they have absorbed hundreds of low-budget European productions, memorized the images and ideas that appeal to them, and then remixed the best of those ingredients into a work of reverent homage. But they lack Tarantino's instinct for showmanship, which elevates the B-movie material from which his work is forged. Unlike the duo behind "Reflection," he intuitively understands that audiences still need suspenseful narratives and characters with whom to empathize.
Here, the dialogue is flat (and dubbed with a slightly artificial sound, as was always the case in these kinds of films). The performances are wooden (with talented actors, like Yannick Renier, reduced to mere mannequins in suits with clenched jaws). And the plot is practically incomprehensible.
The best guess: Testi plays former secret agent John Dimas, now in his 70s, relaxing on a rocky beach on the French Riviera. He gazes into the distance, spots a brunette in a red bikini, and orders a drink. We are in "pure cinema" territory, where words are kept to a minimum while the images tell the story, each composition linking to the previous one: Dimas orders a beer, an extreme close-up of the amber liquid being poured, which then cuts to the sea foam splashing on the woman's skin. She removes her bikini top, lies back, and the sight of a diamond nipple piercing transports him through memories of a lifetime of exploits.
It takes a while to realize that Renier and Testi are playing the same person, seen at different stages of Dimas's life. Perhaps his memory is fading, or perhaps it's all coming back to him now that he's returned to the hotel where an oil tycoon (Koen De Bouw, whose resemblance to Renier is confusing) he was supposed to protect was murdered by his nemesis, Serpentik, dressed in a tight-fitting suit. In a film full of references to cult movies, her name and style are a nod to 1968's "Satanik."
We learn that Serpentik was the most cunning of Dimas's adversaries: with her sharp claws, razor-like fingernails, and a poison ring called the "cobra's kiss," Serpentik left a trail of corpses wherever she went. Recognizing that no one watches James Bond parodies for the plot, the directors of "Reflection" focus on the gadgets, the girls, and the costumes.
All of this is interwoven here, along with a welcome dose of self-parody, in what feels like a montage that summarizes an entire career. The individual sequences adhere to a certain internal logic, like a series of consecutive shots in a trailer, while others depend on prior knowledge of the tropes of this type of crime thriller. Take, for example, the seductive colleague (Céline Camara) in her sequined dress, who can press a red button and unleash her sequins like a thousand ninja stars: this creates a memorable scene, but it doesn't advance the plot at all. While these visual gags are entertaining, the film is so beholden to its genre that no part of it feels grounded in reality.
While Serpentik craved chaos, Dimas's job was to maintain order, and judging by the nonlinear and largely abstract form of "Reflection," she won, even if Dimas believed he had defeated her decades earlier. But these rivals need each other to thrive, and there's a poignant dimension to how the film demonstrates this.
Bringing together the many plot threads toward the end, the directors incorporate comic book pages (both hand-drawn strips and photo-based adventure books) and a film-within-a-film called "Mission Infinity" (starring Hervé Sogne as the generic, handsome John D.) into this postmodern feast, as if "Death in Venice" met "No Time to Die."
Diamonds may be dazzling, but they become tedious to look at after a while. While the duo behind "Reflection" ensures that every frame sparkles, very few of them actually make sense.
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