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Italy
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1996
Directed
by Dario Argento
Starring
Asia Argento
Thomas
Kretschmann
Paolo Bonacelli
Color / 119 Minutes / Not Rated
Format:
DVD (R0 - NTSC | 2-disc set)
Blue
Underground
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Also
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(November 2008)
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10
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SNEAK
PREVIEW
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DVD Release Date: Sept.
25, 2007 |
Film
Review by Troy
Howarth •
DVD
Review by
Brian
Lindsey
Replaces
EC's review of the 1999 Troma edition |
Anna
Manni (Land of the Dead's
Asia Argento) is a policewoman with the Anti-Rape team. Assigned
to hunt down a serial rapist at large in Florence, Manni tracks
him to the famous Uffizi Gallery. While there, she experiences
a strange, disorienting sensation while looking at some paintings.
She passes out and when she awakens, she can no longer remember
who she is or why she was in the museum in the first place.
The rapist, Alfredo Grossi (Thomas Kretschmann of Peter Jackson's
King Kong), witnesses the spectacle
and follows Anna back to her hotel room. There, he brutally
rapes and tortures the young woman before escaping. Traumatized
by the incident, her mind further muddied by the episode at
the museum — which her therapist (Paolo Bonacelli) reveals as
a psychological disorder known as the Stendhal Syndrome — she
continues her hunt for Grossi as her personality undergoes a
drastic change...
Italian
horror maestro Dario Argento, the son of producer Salvatore
Argento and a Brazilian fashion photographer, went from writing
for Rome's Paese Sera newspaper —
where he reviewed favorably the films of Sergio Leone and Mario
Bava —
to breaking into the film industry as a screenwriter; among
his earliest credits is a "co-story" credit on Leone's operatic
masterpiece Once
Upon a Time in the West (1968), to which it is said
that he contributed the bit where Jack Elam is pestered by a
fly. His debut as a director —
the giallo Bird
with the Crystal Plumage (1970) —
announced the arrival of a bold new talent in the genre. Unafraid
to explore —
even wallow in —
the links between eroticism and violent death, his films have
been the constant source of criticism, censorship, disdain and
a massive cult following ever since. After a steady streak of
commercial hits —
Tenebre outperformed
Spielberg's E.T. at the Italian
box-office in 1982, as did Phenomena
opposite Indiana Jones and the Temple
of Doom in 1984 —
the hugely popular director encountered his first commercial
setbacks in the late '80s/early '90s when he decided to relocate
to America in hopes of duplicating his homegrown popularity.
The resulting films —
a Poe portmanteau co-directed with George Romero called Two
Evil Eyes (1989), and a self-referential giallo titled Trauma
(1992) —
have been unfairly maligned,
but few of his loyal followers could argue with his wisdom in
returning to the creative freedom he had available in Italy.
Pre-publicity blitz for his "comeback film", The
Stendhal Syndrome, emphasized it as a return to form,
which is to say graphic, bloody horror as opposed to the restrained
mayhem of his two American films. What few expected, however,
was the bleak, sometimes ugly film he delivered. Embittered
by the censorship imposed upon him in the U.S., a defiant Argento
sought to outdo the colorful violence of his earlier films...
and if The Stendhal Syndrome spills
less buckets of the red stuff than Phenomena
or Tenebre, the tone of the film
is darker and more disturbing. While earlier Argento films derive
a certain sadistic glee in the plentiful murder sequences —
with the all-important 'money shot' coming across as artistic
and stylized instead of realistic —
Stendhal is anything but 'fun'.
The tone is closer to Roman Polanski's Repulsion
(1965) than anything else in the Italian auteur's filmography.
The violence is mean-spirited and unpleasant, not at all cartoonish.
In dealing with the sensitive topic of rape, however, Argento
sensibly avoids bad taste eroticism and presents the scenes
of sexual brutality without leering nudity and concentrating
more on the victim's anguished reactions than the pleasure of
the violator.
A typical potshot
taken against Argento's films is the accusation that his female
characters are little more than pretty pieces of meat invariably
sliced by a knife-wielding madman. Careful scrutiny of his filmography
reveals that Argento's most interesting characters actually
tend to be women; indeed, films like Suspiria
(1976), Phenomena and Opera
(1987) are decidedly female-dominated pieces. Perhaps reacting
to these criticisms, Argento gives the audience a singularly
complex protagonist in Anna Manni —
a capable, ambitious young policewoman who attempts to fight
her psychological demons and fails. Humorously, those critics
who chastised Argento's earlier films for being too simplistic
when it came to feminine characters reacted strongly against
Stendhal, too, feeling that Anna
was unsympathetic. How one can watch her brutalization at the
hands of Grossi and not feel for her pain seems inconceivable
to this reviewer, but then again, some viewers are simply never
satisfied.
Though it is now fashionable
to deride Argento's actress daughter Asia, she gives what I
would consider to be one of the strongest performances in his
filmography as the tormented Anna. It's a difficult role —
full of emotional peaks and ebbs, cool and distant one moment,
fiery and twitchy the next —
and the young actress never fails to convince. Alas, although
the film was shot in English, much of it was ultimately post-synched,
with the actress' throaty voice dubbed by a higher-pitched voice,
apparently to make her sound more "innocent". A lamentable
decision —
presumably not the director's
—
that damages the film considerably, although the rest of the
dubbing is serviceable. The supporting cast includes Thomas
Kretschmann as the psychotic Grossi, truly one of the most despicable
villains in Argento's filmography. Handsome and athletic in
build, Grossi is closer to the deranged protagonist of Ellis'
novel American Psycho than the unhinged psychopaths of
earlier Argento films. Outgoing, charming and attractive, he
could easily conquer virtually any woman on his own merits,
but the act of sex is meaningless to him without the "power"
of sadism and cruelty. Grossi is truly the epitome of senseless,
random sadism and Kretschmann's expert portrayal dominates the
first half of the film. Pasolini veteran Paolo Bonacelli (Salo)
is also fine as Anna's mysterious psychiatrist, while Marco
Leonardi is sympathetic as Anna's bewildered ex-boyfriend.
Argento's propensity
for outlandish visuals is abundant in the film, and it's to
the film's advantage that he was able to secure the services
of Giuseppe Rotunno, who photographed a number of Fellini's
films, notably the ultra-gorgeous experiment that is Fellini
Satyricon (1968). Rotunno's warm visuals lend elegance
to Argento's athletic camerawork, though the director and cinematographer
were apparently at loggerheads during the shoot. Employing shots
that follow pills into a character's stomachs, the director's
powerful visual sense is really at its peak in the various 'hallucination'
scenes that occur when Anna is gripped by the titular (and very
real) disorder. Elsewhere, Argento keeps the visual pyrotechnics
under control as he chronicles Anna's gradually deteriorating
mental state. This is by far Argento's most somber and introspective
work, and the camerawork and lighting are essential to the effect.
Having scored Argento's
first three films, the great Ennio Morricone (Duck,
You Sucker, John Carpenter's The
Thing) outdoes himself here. From the haunting main melody
to various jangly suspense cues, it's possibly Morricone's finest
score for a giallo and is every bit as effective as the hard
rock/heavy metal music that dominated the director's soundtracks
in years prior.
Reviled by many fans
as a misstep by their favorite director, The
Stendhal Syndrome's reputation will surely increase in
the ensuing years. It's certainly his most disturbing work to
date, not to mention his most mature. -
T.H.
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Some
advice for anyone still holding on to the 1999 Troma disc: Throw
it in the trash immediately. That abomination did the film
an unconscionable disservice; not only was the transfer grainy,
overly dark and leeched of color (it's a movie featuring classical
art as a dominant motif, for God's sake!), but the supplements
were heavily loaded with the promotional crap Troma is known for.
I'm most pleased to report that Blue Underground's upcoming two-disc
special edition of The Stendhal Syndrome
blows the Troma version completely out of the water — a resounding
victory even more lopsided than Japan's devastating rout of the
Imperial Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima Strait in 1905.
(You'll just have to forgive me for the odd, obscure analogy.)
BU's anamorphic 1.66:1 transfer looks absolutely
fantastic. Blemish-free, with colors accurately and beautifully
rendered, the film looks like a brand new theatrical release.
Ditto for the aural experience... The BU edition offers first-rate
audio tracks in both English (5.1 Surround &
6.1 DTS) and Italian (Dolby Surround 2.0), with the option of
removable English subtitles. Quite simply, if you've only seen
Stendhal via the Troma DVD then you
really haven't seen it. (It should be noted that a few minutes
of footage never incorporated into the English-language version
are included here; English subs automatically kick on to translate
the Italian dialog.)
Disc 1 contains the film and its English-language
trailer; on the second disc are 102 minutes of newly created bonus
features spread across five separate featurettes. In Director
(20 min.), Dario Argento is interviewed about his conception of
the story, the film's production, reuniting with Morricone and
his own personal experience with the real Stendhal Syndrome, which
he claims struck him while touring the Parthenon in Athens as
a child. Inspiration (21 min.) is a discussion about the
syndrome with psychoanalyst Dr. Graziella Magherini, whose study
of the phenomena served as catalyst for Argento's script. Special
Effects (16 min.) features Sergio Stivaletti chatting about
both his conventional FX techniques and experimentation with computer
graphics for the film. (Stendhal
was the first Italian movie to use CGI.) In Assistant Director
(22 min.), frequent Argento collaborator Luigi Cozzi covers their
working relationship on Stendhal
and other projects, as well as briefly touching on his own career
as a director (The
Killer Must Kill Again, Starcrash).
The last featurette, Production Designer (23 min.), has
Massimo Geleng speaking seriously and thoughtfully about his work
with Argento, only to burst out laughing in embarrassment when
referring to his participation in such exploitation flicks as
Contamination and
2019: After the Fall of New York
(which he dismisses as "bullshit"). -
B.L.
8/31/07 |
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