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TENEBRAE
8/10
aka Unsane
/ Sotto hli Occhi dell’Assassino / Tenebres
Italy
1982 : Dario Argento : 110 mins
Tenebrae
isn’t based in the present, but about five or more years in the future.
It was never meant to be a story about something that is happening now.
It isn’t exactly my Blade Runner, of course, but nevertheless a step into
the world
of tomorrow…
Tenebrae
occurs in a world inhabited by fewer people with the results that the
remainder are wealthier and less crowded. Something has happened to make
it that way but no one remembers, or wants to remember.
Dario
Argento*
Intriguing
ideas – but anyone stumbling across Tenebrae might initially be
baffled that the movie could be taken seriously at all, let alone analysed
in terms of philosophical or cinematic concepts, or cited as the work
of a fascinating ‘auteur’. In the first few scenes the acting is, at best,
erratic, with the additional barrier of haphazard dialogue-looping that
makes the script sound extremely stilted. The garishly bright images are
scored with pounding synth music, and the plot seems to be a tawdry brand
of Eurotrash stalk-n-slash: cult US horror writer Peter Neal (Tony Franciosa)
visits Rome to publicise his latest novel, and finds the city in the grip
of a psychopathic killer who happens to be a fan of Neal’s books.
But
there’s much more to Tenebrae than meets the eye, and it would
be a grave mistake to be put off by the film’s superficial clumsiness.
Just as the audience is starting to balk at the general air of banal crudity,
Argento pulls off a staggering coup that should convince even the
most skeptical viewer that he is, despite evidence to the contrary, a
master of cinema. It’s a two-and-a-half minute crane shot that lingers
over the surfaces of a futuristic tower-block, gliding nimbly over concrete,
slates, windows, blinds… snooping in on the two women who live there,
and who are about to become the killer’s next victim. A sensual symphony
of angles, shapes and movement, it seems to go on forever, accompanied
by that infernal synthesiser – until the shot ends with a cut to one of
the women shouting “Turn it down!”, and we realise that the racket’s coming
from her flatmate’s record-player.
Argento
is, it must be said, showing off his technical virtuosity with this sequence.
But by having the character express the audience’s impatience with the
music, he’s also revealing a sense of humour that radically alters the
mood of what could easily have been yet another tedious psycho-on-the-loose
bloodfest.
Tenebrae becomes, instead, a bizarre, deadpan black joke of a movie,
in the vein of Hitchcock, with Argento seeing how far he can push genre
conventions over the top, while deftly delineating a nightmare world of
constant, irrational threat.
There’s
a lengthy sequence in which John Saxon, as Neal’s sleazy agent, is murdered
in a Roman piazza - a very modern, almost futuristic kind of Roman piazza,
of course - and the whole thing plays out in the broadest of daylights.
So broad, in fact, one realises that even movie’s superbly evocative one-word
title – a Latin term meaning ‘darkness,’ it’s also the title of Neal’s
new potboiler – indicates ironic intent, as there’s barely a shadow in
the whole movie. As another critic has noted, ‘even the night scenes are
brightly lit.’
Tenebrae
should ideally be watched in maximum darkness, in a cinema. On video,
there’s too much temptation to immediately replay scenes, such is the
engagingly bizarre and unexpected nature of what’s shown - from set-pieces
like Saxon’s death, to throwaway bits, such as a Doberman somehow leaping
a ten-foot fence - and what’s said. “What languages does she speak?”
says a policeman, referring to a Filipino maid who’s emerged as a pivotal
witness. “Only Tagalog and Spanish,” comes the straightfaced reply.)
Or sometimes both: early on, as Neal is being told of the atrocities committed
by the killer, a cop thrusts an explicit photo of a murder victim into
his face, only for the author dismisses it with a bafflingly businesslike
“No.”
Such
moments make Tenebrae much more than merely watchable – the movie
becomes a fascinating example of what happens when a real artist takes
hold of a particular genre’s tired conventions and twists them into something
utterly idiosyncratic, perverse, and fascinating. But by doing so Argento
runs a massive risk. There’s the matter of the acting – Franciosa is such
a battle-hardened pro he can look after himself. Veronica Lario, however,
as his vengeful ex-girlfriend Jane, is laughably inept, and most of the
cast are closer, in terms of ability, to Lario rather than Franciosa.
Again,
Hitchcock is a valid comparison – for Argento, the actors are elements
to be manipulated – a necessary evil. He’s not interested in whether they’re
able to deliver a ‘believable’ performance. After all, they’ll probably
be quickly, and messily despatched. Tenebrae builds to a climactic
fifteen minutes which leaves only one character standing, and she’s a
hysterical wreck. To steal Danny Peary’s comment on Videodrome,
the movie ‘loses its mind’ in these latter stages, abandoning its careful
whodunnit structure and throwing itself into an increasingly wild bloodbath.
It’s
as if Argento has decided to emulate his protagonist Peter Neal, who’s
said to ‘cut out the boring bits.’ Tenebrae may baffle, it may
annoy, and it may nauseate unsuspecting viewers. But, in terms of a creative
individual using cinema to express a particular way of looking at the
world, and using a commercial genre as a vehicle for genuinely subversive
ideas and methods, it ends up, against all the odds and expectations,
something close to an astonishing achievement.
*This
Argento comment is taken from interview with Alan Jones in Cinefantastique
(Vol.13, No.8 / Vol.14, No.1), reproduced in Maitland McDonagh’s book
Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds – The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento.
The book contains a lengthy, informative and intelligent analysis of Tenebrae,
as opposed to the essay by Chris Barber & Stephen Thrower in Art
of Darkness (ed Chris Gallant), which bogs down in endless academic
jargon and filmschool-speak.
4th
May, 2001
by Neil Young
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