The directors of The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears and Let the Corpses Tan are back this time tackling superheroes and secret agents.
After making two neo-giallos (Amer and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears) and sidestepping into acid westerns (Let the Corpses Tan), Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are back with their latest cinematic love letter, this time tackling two incredibly unexpected genres: superheroes and secret agents. Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Which opens this FRIDAY in Theaters), follows John Diman (Fabio Testi), an elderly gentleman burning off his twilight years at an oceanfront resort. That is, until a beautiful young woman sunbathing by the beach — with an intriguing diamond nipple piercing – triggers a memory. It’s a distant past where John is a Bond-esque secret agent, sailing away with a handful of uncut diamonds into international waters with a gorgeous female accomplice.
When the sunbathing woman mysteriously disappears, John goes into full-on detective mode, suspecting his old nemesis, the femme-fatale, Diabolik-esque Serpentik, may be behind the murder. The film uses the lush visual language the pair is known for to examine the fragility of memory and point of view through our protagonist, as we flash backward and forward, learning the truth through a dense meta-narrative John has buried deep within his mind. It channels his faded recollections through a nostalgic cinematic lens that would make Quentin Tarantino jealous — a film crafted from various genres and mediums that nonetheless feels wholly like its own gorgeous creature. The film also uses the tropes of these sub-genres to explore their shortcomings and to imbue the story with pointed meta-commentary.
My favorite of these tropes comes from our antagonist Serpentik, who on the surface is a gender-swapped version of the Italian comic-book antihero Diabolik. For added context: whereas American superheroes tend to uphold the status quo, Diabolik would probably be classified as a terrorist nowadays. One of my favorite examples of his Robin Hood-esque hijinks is when the government places an absurd bounty on his head to turn him into an enemy of the people; he responds in turn by blowing up the Italian IRS, instantly winning the public back. Not only is Serpentik a sexy, leather-clad femme fatale, but she has the ability, as implied by her name to shed her skin and change faces, which is where the commentary comes in.
Serpentik represents not only the antithesis of order, the patriarchy and John’s own masculinity — which John is desperately trying to preserve, but through her face-swapping literally illustrates how women are treated as disposable commodities in these films. Every time she becomes a new woman, she fuels John’s paranoia and further proves she’s much more than his equal. It’s a surreal representation that amplifies the paranoia Cattet and Forzani love to employ in their films, because Serpentik could be anyone. This paranoia eventually eats away at the very narrative itself in the film’s final meta plot twist, which for me elevated the film from a fun exploration into a meditative masterpiece that ultimately folds in on itself.
The concept of an old James Bond film is a novel idea unto itself, but Cattet and Forzani use that seed to dig much deeper into the fabric of these sub-genres in a way that demands multiple viewings. They deliver a film that feels like a 90-minute Bond opening sequence — filled with the requisite eroticism and arresting visuals – paired with a narrative as loaded as a pair of headlight-mounted machine guns. Because it deals in secret agents and superheroes, this may be the pair’s most mainstream effort to date, and one that shows the sheer depth of possibilities still left in these sub-genres when the right creative forces take the wheel.
