D2D entry #55: Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971, Dario Argento)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #2.)
The opening credits unspooling over a rock band jamming in the studio lays out Dario Argento’s intent bare - he’s merely riffing with this film, following his visual imagination to its strangest, wildest places to see what it gets him and damn the plot ‘cause the plot don’t matter none no how. Had he made this in 1991, it’d likely be awful and uninspired; at this time, though, Dario was still an unbeatable stylist who could spin amazing setpieces like they just fell out of his head while he slept and all he had to do was scoop them off his pillow in the morning and paste them onto celluloid like so many moth wings.
So yeah, there’s a plot that makes almost no sense aside from the obvious glee Argento is getting in inverting Hitchcock’s iconic wrong-man narrative (here, it’s a man who thinks he’s guilty of something that never happened). But as compensation, there’s some excellent and tense filmmaking: the who’s-stalking-who setup; the sudden, brutally timed poisoning in a public lavatory; the wildly over-the-top penultimate death sequence involving a POV slide down a staircase and the camera literally following a blade into flesh; the balletic climax wherein steel, glass and flesh collide in slow motion to create something cathartic, deserved, painful and strangely moving all in the same swoop. Plus, cultishly adored actor Bud Spencer shows up playing a guy named God. There’s some weird, perverse sexual stuff going on here too, as if Argento was struggling to say something about homosexuality and gender identity. Someone who isn’t me should probably explore that avenue further.
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Oh, cool, Ed Gonzalez already did. Sweet.
