Lost Soul (1977)

aka The Forbidden Room

Original title: Anima persa

Tino (Danilo Mattei), a provincial late teen without much of a clue what to do with his life, comes to Venice to try his hand at studying art. He’s taken in by his uncle, the engineer Fabio (Vittorio Gassman) and aunt Sofia (Catherine Deneuve) to live with them in their decaying palazzo. Half of the place isn’t in a fit state to dwell in anymore, and Sofia and Fabio are very adamant about Tino not going into the attic. That’s pretty much the only thing husband and wife are agreeing on, though: Fabio is a dominating, verbally abusive hypocrite who very casually belittles Sofia, and she is fearful and neurotic about things Tino can grasp even less than the audience does.

Tino quickly – so quickly I’d hardly call it a spoiler – finds out there’s somebody else living in the house. His uncle’s brother is locked up in the attic room, incurably mad, raving, with Fabio his only human contact. Well, and the prostitute that visits once a month, apparently doing her thing with the madman while Fabio watches.

Given how quickly we learn about the man in the attic, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise there are more secrets in the palazzo, some concerning the dead daughter of the couple and the effect her death had on the marriage. Eventually, Tino will find out about all of them.

Dino Risi’s Lost Soul is not your typical Italian Gothic horror, but rather a somewhat arthouse-minded classy drama that thoughtfully takes influences of European Romanticism and Gothic horror to explore ideas of bourgeois hypocrisy and the loss of innocence through a revelation of family sins. Until its final revelations suggest that coming at things from this sideways direction of Gothic horror will still very much leave you making a horror movie. In fact one whose final revelations suggest a depth of perversity and sad corruption, Risi made the right choice not including Christopher Lee and his whip collection.

It helps Risi’s case for the sideways Gothic that Venice – particularly shot as clearly and moodily as DP Tonino Delli Colli does here – seems the perfect place to tell a tale of modern, sadly Gothic decay. It is, after all, a city grand but clearly on its slow way towards nowhere, full of stories terrible and wonderful (there’s an indelible, short sequence where Fabio explains some of the stories surrounding some palazzos they pass on their way to Tino’s school), enticing, but probably smelling of death below its perfume.

As a narrative, there’s very little actually happening here on the surface, but what’s lacking in action is made up by thoughtful and complex dialogue sequences full of allusions, suggestions, and the sharp needles of truth, filtered through fantastic performances by Deneuve (who is so good, you nearly buy her utterly counterfactual bits about the horrors of her aging which in reality are not at all visible on her face) and Gassman. There are layers of meaning – personal, philosophical, political – in the dialogue, but it feels not at all as if it were straining to carry them all. Risi’s touch appears so light, it can only result from a great feat of control.

Obviously, this is not a traditional Italian Gothic, but a film that uses choice elements of the form so well, it still is one of the hidden gems of the genre.

In short: The Shock (1982)

Original title: Le choc

An aging hitman named Christian, who is often going by the alias of Martin Terrier (Alain Delon) rather suddenly decides to retire, and take the payment for the last job he refuses to do as his retirement bonus. Not surprisingly, his former employers are less than happy with his behaviour, trying to get their money back and perhaps retire him more permanently.

So our protagonist decides to lay low on a turkey farm his business manager bought for him, because clearly, nobody’s going to look for him at a place of business he actually owns under his most common alias. The farm is worked by Claire (Catherine Deneuve) and her completely crazy husband Félix (Philippe Léotard). This being a Delon/Deneuve vehicle, the two fall for one another so quickly, they’re banging on the very first night. Possibly for reasons of narrative economy, for hours later, a trio of German terrorists arrive who are very pissed about that time when Christian murdered their boss. Further improbable plot developments follow.

Alain Delon is one of those actors who, once they spent a certain amount of time being stars, suddenly started to believe they were great at every other element of the filmmaking art as well. Producing, writing, directing, while prancing in front of the camera are all in a day’s work for the type, and nobody’s going to tell them they aren’t actually any good at most of these things. And where they once worked under great directors, those are now chosen by their amiability towards the egotistical actor’s every whim.

Which naturally leads us to this very peculiar adaptation of a Manchette novel, co-written by Alain Delon, most probably co-directed by Delon, though credited to Robin Davis, of course starring Alain Delon. It’s about the train wreck you’d expect, with an aging star who often steps over the wrong side of the line dividing his standard icy coldness and just looking bored, a script that uses standard genre tropes badly to excuse a one damn thing after another plot, and direction that seems mostly fixated on making Delon look good in every single scene, even if that’s to the detriment of the film (or even just the scene) as a whole.

The film’s saving grace is its tendency to add the goofiest and most bizarre flourishes to standard thriller scenes. The film is full of strange decisions, elements that seem to belong in a Roger Moore Bond movie (just take the overweight killer lady or the insane ranting of Félix) but don’t seem to be meant as jokes, and plotting so threadbare and illogical, the whole thing becomes actually rather fascinating, and certainly never boring.

Three Films Make A Post: Can You Take It? More Startling . . . More Blood-Curdling Than Anything You've Ever Seen!

The Disappointments Room (2016): I dunno, but unlike much of the rest of the internet, I think D.J. Caruso’s movie about a family escaping a tragedy to a supposed rural dream home, only to have the mother (played by a surprisingly effective and human Kate Beckinsale) start seeing ghosts, is a perfectly acceptable bit of contemporary mainstream horror, with perfectly okay ghost bits. There’s also a semi-competent effort at updating the old “is the woman MAD?” trope into something more palatable, perhaps even meaningful to contemporary eyes. It’s not quite as feminist as it probably thinks it is in its approach there, but like the rest of the film, it’s thoughtful and interesting enough to get a vague thumbs up from me.

The Go-Getter (2007): Martin Hynes film concerning a teenager (Lou Taylor Pucci) going on a road trip in a stolen car to find his long-time absent brother, meeting strange people, falling in love with the owner of the car (Zooey Deschanel), and perhaps doing some growing up in the progress on the other hand is more than just deserving of a vague thumbs up. Stylistically, it’s very much inside of the indie mainstream of its time, but Hynes uses the genre (and believe me, this sort of thing is just as much part of a “genre” as is a slasher or a vampire movie) with warmth, a sense of poetry and obvious liking for his characters – including their fault lines and flaws – while getting fine performances out of Pucci, Deschanel and usual suspects like Judy Greer and Jena Malone.


Le parapluies de Cherbourg aka The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964): Jacques Demy’s musical is of course a stone cold classic, applying things learned from the nouvelle vague and the director’s very personal idiosyncrasies to a conception of the musical that seems – also thanks to the sung dialogue – to try to apply approaches of the opera to the kind of people most traditional opera doesn’t care about, consequently also using quite a different kind of music. Compared to his next musical, the surface-friendlier Young Girls of Rochefort (which I slightly prefer) the material’s dark elements aren’t pretending to be as light (Rochefort doesn’t even make a deep emotional thing out of a serial killer). This is the sort of musical romance that doesn’t get a traditional happy ending because life usually doesn’t have one, and it is one that really wants to talk about actual life in an artistically heightened way. It also happens to be a film that is so drop dead gorgeous (and not just because its actors are) in sound, shape, and movement, the “realistic” sadness of its ending seems to be the least interesting thing about it.