Melbourne International Film Festival - Sydney's supercinephile Barrie Pattison ventures south to discover old films by Dario Argento and new films Marco Bellocchio, Catherine Breillat and more.

Editor's Note: The Dario Argento Retrospective reviewed below is also screening weekly on Thursday nights at 7.00 pm at the Randwick Ritz beginning on Thursday 24 August. The Ritz is screening eighteen Argento titles (cf twelve screened at MIFF). Details of the Ritz season, times, dates, bookings etc, which is presented in association with the Italian Institute of Culture, Sydney, may be found IF YOU CLICK HERE

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Visiting Melbourne for the first time after the pandemic was revealing, an unwelcome reminder of how far Sydney is falling behind with movies. They still have their Chinatown Twin, ACMI’s pretend Cinémathèque and their IMAX theatre which was playing Oppenheimer in the format said to be unique in the Southern Hemisphere. Not only did they have the venues but an audience which would fill them up. Breaks your heart really.

The incentive was the Melbourne International Film Festival, which had some of the material I’d missed in Sydney and a Dario Argento (above) retrospective.  That one was a reminder of researching “The Seal of Dracula” in the days of Paul Naschy, Hitchcock rip-offs, Phantom of the Paradise and the European Fantastic Film Festivals. 

Time was Argento was my favorite filmmaker. I once found myself with a single night in Paris and three hundred plus films to choose from. Agonising! I was still under the spell of Suspiria, which had revealed Argento as the Federico Fellini of the splatter film and was banned in Australia while the rights were held by an independent distributor. Three weeks after the rights passed to Fox, it would open with a twenty second censor cut.  But that is another story.

Deep Red

I elected for Argento’s Profondo Rosso/ Deep Red, the film he made before that. Good choice as it turned out, probably his best work - a mix of sensation and style that was right on my wavelength. That and Suspiria were in the MIFF season. Not always easy to find, the director’s other works generally fail to match those peaks but they are all recognisably from the same hands. In addition, the MIFF showings came via the Instituto Italiano di cultura which meant modern restorations - not always a good thing  but no faded, cut and worn film prints, along with original Italian language sound and English subtitles.

The tracks were an interesting study in themselves. On show, Argento’s second film, the 1971  Il gatto a nove code/Cat O' Nine Tails belongs to the hundred percent post synch era of Italian film and is particularly distracting - we open with Sergio Graziani’s Italian-speaking voice issuing from a blue-eyed Karl Malden’s lips. James Franciscus is better voiced by long-time dubbing actor Pino Colizzi. The lack of background ambiance is obvious, with only odd footsteps and vehicles added in. It’s early days for Morricone but his score has to do the heavy lifting.  

Karl Malden, James Franciscus, Cat of Nine Tails

Nine Tails was the one that gave Argento his least satisfaction. It opens promisingly with blind man Malden out walking on the street with his young niece Cinzia De Carolis, in front of the suburban Terzi Institute for Biological Intelligence. He overhears a suspicious conversation from a parked car (his enhanced hearing is a plot point) & has the girl describe the men in the vehicle they have just passed.

Being Argento Giallo, there’s a sinister figure break-in at the institute, where they can’t work out what’s been taken, and murders accumulate. Carlo Alighiero, one of their scientists, is shoved off a Metro platform to be cut in half by a train. The police now interview the Institute personnel (suspects!) including Terzi Director Tino Carraro’s glamorous daughter Catharine Spaak, in ridiculous fetishistic outfits. She and Franciscus make out but that doesn’t go well when James becomes suspicious about her reluctance to drink from the tetrahedron milk packs the villain has poisoned with a hypodermic - customary Hitchcock reference. Malden heard Spaak fingering the gold watch chain round her neck and deduces that the incriminating information in her medallion has been missed by the police, before her garrotted body was buried with it in the family vault.

Turns out that what was stolen was a file with the chromosome structure of one of the board, showing the homicidal tendencies the institute is studying cf. the 1952 British The Brain Machine. The charts on the institute walls resemble Malden’s Braille puzzle table - Argento conspicuous decoration like Spaak’s squid pattern wallpaper.  

The murderer abducts Malden’s niece and ties her up in a rat-infested room, so the amateur investigator duo appoint themselves tomb robbers and break into the Terzi mausoleum. We get the already characteristic sequence when Franciscus finds himself locked in with his burglar kit inadequate to secure his escape, till the door opens to show Malden with blood dripping off his white stick, which proves to be a sword cane.

The rooftop chase finale is an anti-climax after this, though hands gripping the lift cables got a great yuk reaction from the audience.

Adriano Celentano, The Five Days

MIFF also aired Argento’s next film Le cinque giornate/The Five Days/The Five Days of Milan declaring it an Australian premiere, which is a bit of a liberty. I saw it several times when it was a staple of the Italian language circuit in the seventies, presumably playing to the immense following of Singer Star TV personality Adriano Celantano. (they say his on-air recommendation was instrumental in returning Berlusconi) He makes an uncharacteristically glum lead here.

A historical spectacle set against the 1848 Milan rising against the Austrian occupation, where Adriano has been jailed. A cannonball breaching the prison wall sets him free. He finds himself partnering with baker Enzo Cerusico in a series of disturbing adventures - conscripted into the dotty, murderous militia, assisting at a child birth and finding that even with the power shift they are still at the bottom of the social order. This was the first time I heard the phrase “Siamo fregata!”

The Five Days is not altogether well served by Argento’s taste for the weird and grisly - a lot of close-up bayonetting and blasting point-blank with early firearms. The final killing of the German, seen only as yellow hair thrown up in slow motion, as he is shot in front of his young mistress, comes with the eerie search of the degenerate’s house by the looting pair, that’s getting closer to Fellini. 

These striking images are coaxed out of a limited budget and there are attempts at
innovation, like playing only the sound of the baby over the cavalry charge. Marilu
Tolo does another of her vigorous, sexy turns here. Dario’s producer dad had set up The Five Days for Nanni Loy, in the wake of his imposing 1962 The Four Days of
Naples. Apparently unsuccessful, The Five Days was eventually director, the younger Argento’s, one departure from his giallos

The MIFF dozen film line-up also included Argento’s debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, his 1971 Four Flies on Grey Velvet with Hollywood starlet Mimsy Farmer become sex sensation after displaying her new nose in Barbet Schroder’s More, 1971’s Deep Red , Suspiria 1977, Tenebrae (1982) offering Anthony Franciosa menaced by straight razors, Phenomena (1985) which puts a teenage Jenifer Connolly in the path of a serial killer, The Black Cat from the two part TV Two Evil Eyes (1990), Opera where Palma’s Phantom allies with killer ravens, a 1998 Phantom of the Opera with Julian Sands having sex with rats. While not complete (none of his imposing pre-director scripts were on show) this selection was extensive enough to confirm the impression of  sex, style and violence which made his work attention getting but finally limited.

Do You Like  Hitchcock?00

One I hadn’t previously been able to see, despite my best efforts and a European retrospective, was Argento’s 2005’s Ti piace Hitchcock?/Do You Like Hitchcock?, the first entry in a TV Hitchcock-themed series. The reduced budget shows mainly in having Elio Germani the only familiar face, in an Argento film without an imported star. The technicians are A-feature guys including musician Pino Donaggio.

Here we get giallo black gloves that don’t leave prints, La finestra di fronte, delito per delito like Strangers on a Train. The Hitchcock citations also run to extreme close-ups - the lift mechanism locking, the close-up of the lit cigarette end, the keys in the tumbler.

In this one, then young Germani is a film student, the sole example in movies who takes notes, even if he uses a wide-screen TV that crops Der Golem. He’s also a voyeur, watching the action in the downstairs flat from his windows. Of course, he sees a murder there.

He falls out with fetching lady friend Cristina Brondo (the one featured female not to go topless in this one) who deserts his bed, with him dumping her effects into the street bin where the bag lady scoops them into her shopping trolley. Elio sets out to investigate. He steals the victim’s bank statement, revealing a million lire inheritance and gets into the crime scene, when the char lady is busy mopping up the blood. Her supervisor buys Elio’s claim to be a reporter (again) and wants to know which paper he’ll be able to read his own name in.

When our hero is left in charge of the neighbourhood video shop, a large poster of Argento’s Il cartaio/The Card Player is prominent. Elio gets into the store computer to find the details of blonde downstairs tenant Chiara Conti, just as she comes in, with some scrambling to clear the screen before she sees her own details there. Her showing interest in her cute neighbor upsets proprietor-admirer Iván Morales.

Determined to penetrate the imbroglio, Germani hops on his moped to follow Conti’s car to work and, using his binoculars, sees her being groped by her bald realtor boss. Here the growing storm sounds are effective, as we get to the Argento set piece. Germani climbs the plants on the building where the lowlife takes the girl and is spotted, falling and injuring his knee. Unchaining the moped, which he has to side saddle,  he flees the vengeful boss through belting rain.

In full Rear Window mode, Brondo comes back to care for Germani, his leg in plaster. Plausibility takes a pounding with an attempt to add two more climaxes - a graphic near drowning and the black hoody he saw through his peephole door re-appearing, putting Brondo in jeopardy. 

It doesn’t really matter who the killer is and the nudity is gratuitous but Argento has clearly hit his stride by this one. MIFF has a history of adventurous Cinémathèque quality retrospectives - Tomu Uchida and Jean Epstein! Add Argento to their welcome break from endless Ozu and Bergman.

Short films, often a strength of these, were disappointing this time out but the event was a chance to pick up on films I’d missed in the Sydney festival.

Intriguingly one (the one?) survivor, from the days of cinema reverence and cult status for the Godards and Bergmans, is Marco Bellocchio (above), who at age eighty-three has offered what may be his best work, the new Rapito/Kidnapped, a film with ferocious anti-Catholicism (compare the director’s 1971 Nel nome del padre) which would have made it unscreenable through a large part of its director’s life - and mine. Bellocchio’s work has not always been readily available, with a wide range of subject matter and style. The films which seem to have proved most acceptable to distribution chains tend to be his intense Italian History pieces like the 2009 Mussolini film Vincere and the 2003 Aldo Moro  Buongiorno, notte/Good Morning Night but those were set closer to our own time.

This one takes place during the unification of  Italy and is played in painting-like compositions of costumed performers in historic settings, filmed without fill light so that the story seems to be engulfed in the shadows of history.

In 1857 Bologna, the constables come for Enea Sala, the six-year-old son of a rich Jewish family, claiming that his secret baptism makes him eternally a Christian, who must be removed from their control. No question of balancing here. The Jews are uniformly noble in bearing the persecutions visited upon them by Catholics, who are uniformly malicious whether through conviction or convenience. “Worse than the Pharoah” the boy’s mother, Barbara Ronchi says of Inquisitor Fabrizio Gifuni.

Young Sala is transferred to the Vatican and the company of a number of other reclaimed children, who coach him into going along with the gag to facilitate his return to his family, though he still repeats the Scherma Israel each night. Paolo Pierobon’s Pope Pius makes a personal project of the boys, while Fausto Russo Alesi the father, always in forced deference, pleads for his release. The mechanics of this campaign generates the film’s suspense and its interest. We wait for the factions invoked to act - the Rothschilds, who hold Vatican debts large enough to destroy the Church, worldwide opinion mobilised by the press to the point of possible intervention. In the face-to-face meeting between Pierobon and Alesi, the Pontiff is enraged that even the Catholic papers have been approached to urge the father’s case.

The boy’s brainwashing proceeds with two vivid lapses. The first, where Ronchi has been granted a visit and her son acts with instructed composure only to rush back to his mother’s arms as the emotion becomes too strong. Approaching the film’s end, the character, now played by Leonardo Maltese, from the Amelio 2022 Il signore delle formiche/Lord of the Ants, is part of the Pope’s funeral cortege on the way to his tomb when the mob surges over them screaming “Throw the pig in the Tiber” a chant into which he finds himself drawn.

These bursts of hysterics are uncharacteristic of the film’s grim, measured content, which includes now trainee priest Maltese called upon to use his tongue to inscribe the sign of the cross on the marble floor three times to atone to Pierobon. We also get the aging Pope’s vision of the newspaper cartoon of Jewish invaders circumcising him come to life and the scene of a wooden Jesus descending from the cross - second time this week - after The New Boy.

With the 1870 loss of the Papal states to Risorgimento troops with feathers in their hats, who break down the walls to rescue Maltese, inquisitor Gifuni is put on trial providing the film’s most intriguing and unique material, as details of the abduction and it’s likely bogus basis are tested in court.

It’s rare to find a film, where issues are central, holding attention so well. Most of the cast have been around for years without drawing our attention, which gives them the double value of experience and a lack of previous associations. They and the technicians are on top of their game. The viewer’s own belief structure is likely to fog any message content but it can’t be a bad thing to put a  work of such intense scrutiny into circulation.

Back again after a decade, L'été dernier/Last Summer looks a vintage offering from Catherine Breillat (above), once poster lady for transgressive film. We get elegant lawyer Léa Drucker briefing a teenage girl rape victim on the rough spots she faces in her legal action. This suggests the creator of 36 Fillette & Blue Beard is going to deliver a smart, in character social drama. However before long, we find we’re in for a retread of Phaedra, via a Danish 2019 Trine Dyrholme movie.

We learn about childless Drucker, victim of a youthful misadventure, now in a super respectable marriage with Olivier Rabourdin, that runs to an explicit make-out scene. The pair have adopted two young Asian girls. However, Rabourdin’s teenage son by his first marriage, Samuel Kircher, is already having brushes with the law. A laboured bit of business with the kids’ keychain gift establishes his guilt in a break-in at the family home.

Léa warns him to shape up or else and that goes implausibly well, with Sam swimming with the girls on a picnic and doubling Léa on his motor scooter away from the boring gathering (OK extended traveling shot) to the livelier surroundings of a local boite. It’s not long before the two get into a sustained double close-up lip lock and a bit of “No, we shouldn’t.” They represent the contrast of the Pill Generation and the AIDs Generation. Developments like sister Clotilde Coreau catching the guilty couple or Kircher’s illicit dictaphone recordings, don’t go anywhere interesting.

On his time out together with dad Rabourdin, the kid dobs Léa in and the best the movie can come up with is Léa po faced denying it. They go to court, with her getting the kind of legal bruising that we’ve seen her describe, and paying out big.

The marriage survives and she’s back naked in the sack with Rabourdin, when the doorbell rings and Kircher is downstairs drunk...

Neither the cast or the handling are able to generate conviction and this one has to be rated a disappointment.

Art College 1994 

Jian Lu’s unexpected Chinese feature cartoon Art College 1994 is off-putting at first, with its literal, shading-free visuals and lip-synch characters.  The opening with the cartoon beetle failing to climb a wall suggests an imagery which will only dot the work - a butterfly, an insect on a diner plate, a distant flying crane.  What this one foregrounds is student characters lost in the familiar confusion of demanding what is art - Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Andy Warhol, is the moon more beautiful than a board? One dissatisfied boy burns his drawings to be copied by another hailing it as an aesthetic statement. “Is it art because I say so?”  - all here amplified by China’s uneasy entry into the Market Economy, which introduces engulfing Western ideas, in streets dotted with Golden Arches and Superman the Movie posters. Their traditional painting instructor in a Mao Jacket promotes their Asian heritage and the bridge of Light still rates a visit. 
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We start off with boys with haircuts done by their chums, from the dorms where the walls are decorated with posters of Rambo and The Chairman.  A pair are facing discipline for having roughed up one of their fellows, who disfigured their work. They discuss what to do with a Tracy Ermin exhibit, where only the bed can be recycled. A warden tells them not to sit on the art. One student doesn’t want to create, planning on becoming an entrepreneur. Somewhere in there, we get the killer Picasso quote “A good artist borrows from other artists. A great artist steals from other artists.” 

The leads become involved with the two girl music students, whose ambition is to give a concert together. There is a surprisingly relatable scene where they mimic the voice delivery of old dubbed Chinese movies. The glamorous one will quit to become a club singer while her plain friend’s mother has set up a meeting with the tailored student from an Ivy League university, where he studies French. He invites them all to dinner and the boys hog themselves at the buffet, in surroundings that contrast with their own grubby building, with its bunk beds and pink-painted steel window frames. 

I couldn’t help thinking about the presentations I used to do with the murky nineties Russian Agfacolor School for Beauty Appreciation two-reeler touting the slab concrete building with steel pipe chairs as surroundings from which we were told works of great artistry could only emerge.

It is remarkable that the crudely drawn characters lost in unexceptional lives become so involving. They have been voiced by home territory celebrities whose names don’t register here. Finally relating the subsequent lives, American Graffiti style, over snaps, given life by animating their still photo texture, is extraordinarily moving. I rate the film as the best I’ve seen from China since the second Wolf Warrior - maybe before. It has yet to open in its intended market.