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Latarnia
presents CASTILIAN CRIMSON SINFONIA EROTICA
1979 |
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Latarnia
presents CASTILIAN CRIMSON SINFONIA EROTICA
1979 |
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Director: Jesus Franco Spanish-Portuguese Co-Production:
Triton P.C. (Madrid), Estudios 8 (Lisboa) |
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Reviews by Mario and Roderick Gauci, and Francesco Cesari The Mario and Roderick Gauci Review This is by far the most distressing Jess Franco movie
I’ve seen yet and which, by the end, has left me even more baffled
than was the case with (the superior) EUGENIE DE SADE (1970)! As some of
you may know, I’ve seen more Franco films from the 1960s than any
other period of his career – so watching this semi-hardcore effort was
an uneasy experience for me, to say the least! Anyway, let’s start from the beginning. The plot in
itself – expanding on one of the many incidents that comprise the
Marquis de Sade’s “Justine” – is certainly interesting enough: Aesthetically, the film is thoughtfully conceived and presented (apparent even in the full-frame VHS I watched) with several beautiful shots of the country-side interspersed with the numerous mysterious passageways of the villa, evoking through a voice-over the female protagonist’s wildly divergent state-of-mind. In moments like these, I’d agree that this is one of Franco’s better works; the final ‘executions’, too, smacking of a peculiarly ‘giallo’ atmosphere (perhaps Franco was already thinking of doing BLOODY MOON [1980]?) – even though the film is set sometime in the 19th century – should reward patient viewers . For better or worse, the film’s leading actors are extremely convincing: not so much that Franco demands some extraordinary quality out of them, far from it , but because the way their characters behave on screen elicits an authentic (and generally uncomfortable) response from the viewer: · Lina Romay makes for a compelling and usually
intense focus for the viewer throughout the whole film (and she
certainly seems to have a knack for expressing sexual frustration!);
this is actually the first true film of hers I’ve seen (the other two
– LA MALEDICION DE FRANKENSTEIN [1972/3] and LA NOCHE DE LOS ASESINOS
[1973] – were more or less ensemble pieces, where she was just one of
many characters. -- Reviewed by Mario and Roderick Gauci, copyright December 2003 The Francesco Cesari Review All
of us Jess Franco fans know that he was a musician before being a
filmmaker, yet we don't know much about his musical tastes. Jazz apart,
what musical genre or what composers does he prefer? The
choice of using Franz Liszt's scores in some of his films could give us
our first answer. Many Franco fans will remember the trumpet solo in the
night-club where Miss Death performs her shows (MISS MUERTE, 1965): it's a
transcription from Franz Liszt's Dream of Love No.3 in A Flat
Major (as a matter of fact a nocturne), one of those piano "Love
Melodies", once very popular, that all good-family ladies and girls
liked to play in their houses. Franco has used this sentimental melody
numerous times, in the most disparate transcriptions. It will be just
the Dream of Love No.3, strummed by Lina Romay on a small piano,
which will magically open a strong-box full of gold bars in the last
scene of LA NOCHE DE LOS SEXOS ABIERTOS (1981). However,
no classical score has such a great importance in a Franco film as
Liszt's Second Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1839-1861),
since its original score forms a large part of SINFONIA EROTICA's
musical soundtrack. [See note
below.] It suffices to know that Franco used the whole Concerto, except for the
67 bars of “Sempre Allegro”, “Marziale, un poco meno Allegro”
and “Un poco animato” (one minute and a half total). The
key-importance of this choice is pointed out already in the title:
SINFONIA EROTICA is really a film built around a symphonic music score,
where the pace of the acting and dialogue adjusts itself to the time of
music. It looks as if Franco wrote and shot the film while keeping the
different episodes of the Concerto in his mind. Before
talking about the film, it's worth trying to explain what it is in
Liszt's music that attracted Franco so much. Probably he was interested
in the strong dialectics between popular and experimental typical of
Liszt's music; an unusual coupling in the world of classical music, but,
at the same time, one of the key-aspects (many times underlined by the
director himself) in Franco's cinema. One
of the many Franco's adaptations from the work of Marquis De Sade (Justine's
de Bressac episode), SINFONIA EROTICA postpones the action to more than a
century later, plunging it in that late-romantic, languid and decadent
atmosphere so perfectly embodied by Liszt’s music. The director's
aesthetic choices follow from this chronological shifting, beginning
with the decadent setting in an old villa, as vast as it is bare, surrounded
by an autumnal nature filmed by Franco and cinematographer Juan Soler
using French Impressionism as their model. But as Franco has no
intention to pay tribute to a costume-film's oleography (he already did
this in the late 60s), so, too, he doesn't limit himself to use Liszt's music as an
historical element but establishes a deep connection between musical and
visual forms. Even more than Wagner, Liszt was the composer who, in 19th
century, dissolved the certainties of the classical form. The paratactic
structure of his harmonic language and the cyclical (instead of
dialectical) form of his compositions are the basis on which he develops
those melodies which seem to be wandering about aimlessly (so well
represented by the Second Concerto) finding a perfect visual
answer in Franco's slow and unforeseeable camera movements and in that
extreme dissolution of the space co-ordinates, which is the most
fascinating aspect of SINFONIA EROTICA. In all the key-scenes Franco
refuses to rationalize the organization of space by means of field depth, but restricts the focus to
a portion of an image or even concentrates
only on close-ups and details, without the unceasing camera work (almost a subliminal melodic journey)
clearly showing us the real
structure of the rooms and especially the bedrooms in which most of the
action takes place. The rest is darkness, shadows and out-of-focus: forms
and techniques already used by Franco, examples of which are easily
found in his later movies, but which in SINFONIA EROTICA are realized in
a particularly extreme and radical way. What drives the director in this
direction is without doubt the need to create a kind of spongy image,
fit to become imbued with music; whereas what makes the experiment
successful is probably the presence of a new cinematographer, that Juan
Soler who, from SINFONIA EROTICA onwards, will work on Franco's side in
almost fifty films (also playing in many of them) and who was perhaps his
ideal collaborator behind the camera. Like
all the amour-fou stories, SINFONIA EROTICA is also a story of a
mental illness. At the beginning of the film we see the Countess Martine
de Bressac (Lina Romay) travelling on a carriage through the country.
Martine is coming back home after a stay in a mental hospital. At her
side in the carriage there's a man with a top-hat who never looks at her
– as she never looks at him – but says to her an enigmatic phrase:
"I hope everything proceeds in the way you and I wish." This man is Martine's shady psychoanalyst, Dr. Louys (Albino Graziani). Once the door of the villa,
which she will never leave till the last scene, is shut behind her,
Martine suddenly finds herself immersed in memories which take the form
of voices: the love-talk between her and her husband Armand (Armando
Sallent) in the first days of their marriage and, immediately after,
when Armand insults and repels her. Martine
won't meet her husband until many scenes later, but, in the meantime,
she will have learned from Wanda (Aida Gouveia), her loyal lady companion,
that during her absence Armand has entered into a homosexual
relationship with Flor, a curly-headed youth (Mel Rodrigo). These
few narrative elements make clear that the previously described singular
space conception is functional to the creation of a sort of home for the
psyche, a "psyche-home", where reality mingles with memory and fancy. The small and big narrative
inconsistencies with which the film is studded are nothing else but the
reflection of a mental condition – the protagonist's – that
periodically takes over and upsets the logical flow of events. Other
directors would have striven to go along a double line – the external
logic of the facts and the internal logic of the psyche – in such a
way as to avoid clashing against the audience's rational categories.
Franco, as ever, prefers solutions of shocking “realism” – as he
likes to call them – without taking the trouble to save appearances. By
the way, the representation of this psyche-home answers to a cogent
logic. In fact, while on the one hand, the bedrooms, that is, the seat
of inner experiences and unconscious desires, look like places devoid of
spatial coordinates, since their shape is not clear to the viewer; and
also the dining-room looks like a fully-lit round table with a white
cloth – filmed by incessantly turning the camera around – but
surrounded by a mysterious half-darkness; on the other hand, staircases
and corridors – that is, the mind's connective functions, which have
nothing to do with the thought contents – are clearly shown, and
characters go up and down or through them repeatedly – now with a
ritual slow pace, now running – in some of the most exciting scenes. Where
psychoanalysis is, there is dream; and, in fact, the very sexual
experiences of the protagonist tend to cross the frontier between
reality and dream, which, on the other side, appears as vague as in A
VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD (1971). When, one morning, Martine
apologizes to her maid Norma (Susan Hemingway) for having sexually
abused her the past night, the girl answers at first that she doesn't
understand what her mistress is talking about – therefore giving value
to the idea that it was only a dream – but then concludes: “Yo estoi
al so servicio, signora Martine: sos deseos son ordenes para mi / I am
at your service, Mrs. Martine: your desires are orders for me”,
leaving us doubtful. “I
hope everything proceeds in the way you and I wish." According to Dr. Louys'
instructions, Martine has come back home with the aim of freeing herself
from the source of her depression, but, for the moment, no humiliation
is enough to make her change her feeling towards Armand, whom she
viscerally loves and obsessively desires. As in every respectable psychoanalytic
therapy, sex is the key to everything, and after more
than twenty minutes of absolute romanticism, at last Martine
acknowledges to
herself the true, bodily nature of her desire and resolves to open the
door of her husband's room in the attempt – totally unsuccessful for
now – to get fucked. From now onwards her actions will be more and
more driven by sexual impetuses which induce her, firstly, to recite a
sort of blasphemous prayer by the light of an oil-lamp (worthy
antecedent of Bess McNeill's prayers in Lars Von Trier's BREAKING THE
WAVES) and then to slip by night in the room of the young maid, Norma,
an ex-nun and the free elaboration of Justine's character from the novel
by de Sade. Such
a combination between romanticism and sex is SINFONIA EROTICA's most
eccentric and perhaps baffling aspect, but it's not only a logical but
even an indispensable choice in the light of the protagonist's psychoanalytical
journey. Without these sex scenes the final dénouement
would be senseless. A morbid and unhealthy sex, by the way – as
Martine, Armand and, after all, also Liszt’s own music are morbid and
unhealthy – the function of which will turn out to be, nonetheless,
cathartical. However,
when eroticism becomes more delirious, Liszt's Concerto gives way
to the synthesizer music composed by Franco himself, the cold and
hallucinated tone of which produces a striking contrast with Liszt's
sentimentalism; someway mirroring the dialectics between candles and
oil-lamps, two key items in the iconography of this film. Many
things happen around Martine. Persuaded by Armand, the maid begins to
pour toxic powder in her breakfast milk; the lady companion discovers
the criminal plan of the Marquis, who strangles her; Flor and Norma
fall in love with each other (the inversion/conversion of the invert by
means of an ex-nun: things which happen only in Franco films) and begin
wandering through the park hand in hand before giving free reign to one
of the deepest kisses in Franco's filmography. But
with respect to all that surrounds her, Martine seems to live in a state
of remoteness, awakening only during the sex scenes. As a perfect 19th
century Lady, she plays the piano in one of the most unforgettable
sequences, during which the shadows let us see only her eyes gazing at empty space, lost in the music; and while she spends her days locked
up within the walls of her home, her imagination flies out of the window
towards open spaces: the autumnal trees and a strange sea without
horizon, shot from high, pierced by beams of light, and just dotted with tiny gulls:
the most unreal sea Franco has ever filmed, a spot of colour and light
without any spatial connection with the Bressac villa, the mere
emanation of a mental vacuum and distance. This
feeling of remoteness and substantial incommunicability between Martine
and the surrounding reality is stressed by the fact that the camera
often doesn't frame the mouth of who's talking, thereby producing a sense
of schizophrenia between word and image once again associated to the
protagonist's illness. A form of narrative schizophrenia that on two
occasions reaches genuine disconcerting levels. The first occasion is the
carriage scene, at the beginning of the film, when we see Dr. Louys
silently moving his lips while we hear Martine's inner thoughts. The
second is a short scene, likewise between the patient and the psychoanalyst,
this time in Martine's house, apparently shot without dialogue (we have
mainly a back-view of shady Dr. Louys, but just the way he moves
suggests he's not talking), as a sort of dumb-show during which the two
characters communicate with each other by means of gestures and glances,
showing a sort of secret complicity. Sitting and, as usual,
embroidering, Martine points to a sideboard with a simple hand gesture;
the doctor opens a drawer and takes an envelope: a psychologically
refined as well as mysterious scene, except that over this silent
dialogue – on a sort of secondary level – we hear the voice of the
doctor giving his patient a series of pretty obvious prescriptions. But
such ambiguities give also rise to some questions. Who is the doctor
really? Is he the sensitive psychoanalyst who tries hard helping
Martine? Or the shady, cynical man who, as a matter of fact, sides with
the Marquis and refuses to listen to Wanda's denunciation? Is his figure
distorted in Martine's fantasy by a form of transference, as seems to be
demonstrated in the final scene? And finally: Is the whole story a
product of Martine's oneiric fantasy? Lastly,
this sense of troubled estrangement is further emphasized by the acting,
based on intense and essential looks and gestures, once again in
accordance with the silent cinema model so dear to Franco. Some scenes
could run very well – perhaps even better – without dialogue, such
as the one just described or the scene in which the Marquis, running
after his young lover through the park, discovers the unconscious nun.
His gesture of fanning himself with the hat, while he goes upstairs,
following Flor and Giorgio (the black major-domo, played by George
Santos) who carry the girl to the villa, evocates a distant time in the
history of cinema. The
film's conclusion is as melodramatic as unforeseen. At long last fucked by
her husband, Martine dies – or rather seems to die – of a hearth
attack, while Armand, Flor and Norma stage a cheerful, grotesque
farewell. One night, some time later, the Marquis takes revenge for
Flor's infidelity by running him and Norma through with one of his
ancient swords while they are making love. In the end, he, the only
survivor in the villa, deeply grieving, hears the noise of steps: it's
Martine who didn't really die and now walks through the villa in a
violet dressing-gown moving toward her husband to take her final
revenge; the man, now psychically exhausted, not only doesn't defend
himself but even prays the wife: “Put an end to my remorse: kill
me.” So, Martine takes the sword with which he had formerly killed
Flor and Norma and slowly runs it through his throat. A
very intense and exciting ending, which may, however, leave the viewer
perplexed since Franco doesn't explain why Martine – whom all of us
thought died – is, in fact, alive. Did she pretend to be dead? Did she ingest a
drug which led her to catalepsy? But
once again what appears obscure on the plot level, looks perfectly clear
on the psychological one, as the very death is the necessary condition
that allows Martine to revive as a recovered woman. It's
time to leave home. Martine runs towards the hug of shady Dr. Louys, who
waits for her at the end of the corridor: "Life begins again for you
– I fear – […] You must forget these old walls, this sad story." Such
a melodramatic ending would be enough to justify Franco's choice of
moving the action to late 19th century (or perhaps early 20th, but
anyway within a 19th century atmosphere). However one mustn't forget
that 19th century aesthetic universe – its iconography, its music –
coincides here with the poetical dimension of remoteness and memory,
i.e. it's seen from a modern times perspective. And here is the
essential difference between Jess Franco and those directors who deceive
themselves (and the audience) that they can really recreate on the
screen an age which isn't theirs. So, the personal story of Martine,
her coming back home, gains the meaning and the value of a wider and in
the meantime more complex, two-faced spiritual experience: SINFONIA
EROTICA is the confession of a nostalgia for the romantic-decadent
culture and at the same time the pitilessly realistic portrait of the
nature of the man-woman relationship in the nowadays not-yet-ended age of
idealism (and consequently of sexual inhibition/repression) and told from
the point of view of a director who has already filmed for the screen all
kinds of erotic scenes. In other words, the ambivalence of Martine's
feeling isn't anything else than the mirror of the attitude of Franco,
whose point of view doesn't get unified even at the end, as by surprise
the camera doesn't follow Martine and her shady psychoanalyst/lover in
their victorious going out from the villa, but turns back its last
look/shot at first on the romantic death embrace of that odd couple of
young lovers with a questionable past – a gay Romeo and a nun Juliet
– and then on the dissolved in a light halo candle's little flame, the
very symbol of the 19th century: two archetypal-images on which Liszt's Concerto
affixes its musical seal. SINFONIA
EROTICA has been released on VHS in Spain by Video Service and in Italy
by Video Kineo, but Franco fans usually know it only in the Italian
dubbed version as it's the only one easily available in the grey market.
However, whoever really wishes to know this film must find out the ultra
rare Spanish original version, since it doesn't contain the little cuts
of the Italian version, includes the original opening-credits sequence
(instead of inscriptions on black background) and – most importantly
– presents considerable differences in the dialogue and the dubbing.
Probably in view of a triple-X theatres distribution of this odd film
– one of the most out-of-genre Franco has ever shot – the Italian
dubbing adds in fact a number of silly obscenities such as “You, too,
take part in the orgy!”, “Put it more inside, Flor, I beg you! I
wish to feel it all…” etc. In other points, the rewriting twists the
sense of the dialogue, as when the Marquis, breaking in into Wanda's
bedroom to kill her, bursts out with an absurd “You're uglier and
uglier!” that dispels the ambiguity of the situation (will the perverse
Marquis rape or kill her?) whereas the Spanish original justifies
Wanda's swift change from the fear of being raped to the dread of being
killed. Analogously, the dialogue between the black major-domo and the
Marquis, while the two gaze at the idyllic couple of lovers walking
outside the villa, changes from “Did you think Master Flor was so much
in love with her? [Norma] – Yes” to “Would you ever believed Fiore
was so stupid? – Yes.” The
Italian dubbing – often overacted and sometimes coarse – is likewise
unsatisfying in comparison with the sobriety and intimacy of the
Spanish one. Even more detrimental is the drastic reduction of that
part of the soundtrack which is neither word nor music: noises, sighs,
moaning, echoes, all sound elements which are absolutely essential to
surround the action with a hallucinated atmosphere. Lina Romay merits the last word. The faithful Jess Franco's ciakfellow gives here one of her best performances ever: sensitive, subtle, natural from the first to the last scene. Her truly romantic look – big eyes and sensual, madly big mouth – renders Lina the ideal actress for playing the part of this loving madwoman. Note:
According to the film credits, it is Liszt's inexistent Forth Piano
and Orchestra Concerto. |
