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PHENOMENA
7/10
Italy
1985 : Dario Argento : 111mins
“I
am sleepwalking. I must wake up. I am sleepwalking. I must wake up.”
Jennifer
Corvino, Phenomena
Phenomena
isn’t the best introduction to Dario Argento - newcomers may be baffled
by both this particular movie, and also by Argento’s reputation as the
maestro of recent Italian horror. On a rational, normal level, the movie
is ludicrous, and there are occasions when it seems sloppy, even
amateurish. But Argento has never been especially interested in ‘rational’
or ‘normal’ material, and the world of cinema would be much the poorer
without such crackpot, visionary mavericks. It also doesn’t help that
the full, 111-minute version of Phenomena has been only intermittently
available over the years, and many viewers have had to make do with the
83-minute cut released in the US as Creepers. The proper version
hardly makes much ‘sense’ to begin with, and the removal of almost half
an hour of running time presumably results in total incoherence.
The
plot, if it can be called such, sees American teenager Jennifer Corvino
(Connelly) packed off to a Swiss finishing school by her father, a movie
star filming his latest epic in the Philippines. Jennifer finds it hard
to settle in, thanks to the obnoxious creepiness of the staff, the cruel
hostility of her schoolmates, and the local antics of a psychopathic killer.
But Jennifer has a secret – a supernatural empathy with insects of all
kinds, who willingly submit to her control. She’s also prone to sleepwalking,
and one night wanders off campus into thick forest, where she bumps into
a chimpanzee who leads her to disabled entomologist Prof MacGregor (Pleasence).
Jennifer, the Professor, the chimp and the insects band together to track
down the killer, before he/she can strike again…
Or
something. It’s a crazy set-up for a film, and, adding in the wooden performances,
the absurd, clumsily dubbed dialogue, and the apparently random application
of heavy metal on the soundtrack, you end up with a very strange viewing
experience, as likely to provoke giggles and chills of fright. It’s never
easy to tell just how much is being played for laughs, and how much should
be taken seriously. One of the most disturbing things in the movie is
a hideous, cheap Bee Gees t-shirt, and there’s a wry moment when Jennifer,
trying to creep silently out of a room, knocks over a knitting needle
which falls straight down into a handy ball of wool. And though the script
is played ‘straight,’ it’s full of wild absurdities (“I have to join my
regiment at dawn” deadpans a young bloke to his girlfriend), and every
line spat out by the harpy-like head-mistress is borderline hilarious.
When a dozy pupil blurts out ‘screw the past’; during a poetry lesson,
the head sets off on a foot-stomping rant: “What about ancient Greece?!”,
and later she compares Jennifer to something she pronounces ‘Baal-zee-boob’:
“She’s not normal! She’s diabolic!”
Such
quirks keep Phenomena watchable, even though they also make it
very hard to take seriously. But Argento knows exactly what he’s doing
at every stage – the film opens with a slow pan up some wind-blown trees
that’s worthy of Tarkovsky, and he shows remarkably little of the killer
(not even a gloved hand) until very late on. He confidently deploys weird
imagery, lighting and sound-effects to construct a bizarre, surreal, dream-like
state. Jennifer sleepwalks, and finds herself unable to wake, even when
she realises she isn’t awake or in control, just as the audience, while
constantly aware of the artificiality of the movie, are powerless to act.
The film thus makes perfect sense in psychological terms (if no
other) as as a representation of Jennifer’s disorientation in this strange
new country. Argento similarly disorients and unsettles the audience with
his unpredictable use of (bad) mid-80s heavy metal on the soundtrack and
his increasingly haphazard plotting, liberally peppered with ‘shock’ moments.
But
even the most ludicrous aspects of the movie do make, on reflection, a
kind of sense. The headmistress is a cardboard caricature of stroppy strictness,
but surely this beautiful, repressed woman, forever obsessing over ‘normality,’
is a savage satirical swipe at the Swiss national character. Behind the
superficial orderliness of these picture-postcard surroundings, Jennifer
finds a maelstrom of violence, horror and irrationality – as in any persecution-complex
nightmare, she’s surrounded by irrational foes, people who despise her,
who work against her. But the original twist here is that she also has
irrational friends – the insects. She receives telepathic ‘images’
from the perspective of ladybirds and maggots, and trusts a corpse-eating
fly to lead her to the killer’s lair, eventually commanding a vast swarm
of bluebottles to engulf the monstrous psychopath in a sensationally visceral,
no-holds-barred finale.
April 14th
, 2001
by Neil Young
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