You know how fast film history moves when you look back on the career of Italian horrormeister Dario Argento, who had his heyday in the Seventies with bloody thrillers like Deep Red and supernatural horror that influenced John Carpenter’s Halloween. (He was also a script consultant on George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and, more mysteriously, on Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.) Apart from Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Argento’s 1977 supernatural thriller Suspiria, not much has been heard from him recently, with most of the family noise being made by his actress-director daughter Asia. Just last summer he received a lifetime achievement award from the Locarno Film Festival.
Lo and behold, this year’s Berlinale Special includes a brand new thriller from the 81-year-old director, who is still very much in tune with the genre he helped create. Dark Glasses (Occhiali neri) may be a tamer beast than we’re used to seeing these days. It skimps on the gallons of red food coloring that made Argento’s early works unforgettable, but the premise here (blind escort vs. ruthless strangler) has a chilling absurdity that piques the curiosity about how it will play out. It’s well-paced fun for a good midnight movie streaming in the living room but not, perhaps, edgy enough to bring audiences into a theater. Only the steely, larger-than-life presence of Ilenia Pastorelli, whose strong features are made up to look like she stepped out of a comic book, may draw younger viewers who remember her debut in They Call Me Jeeg, which won her a following and a David di Donatello award.
As Diana, Pastorelli makes a rather dazzling call girl in her short skirts and red matte lipstick, working the upscale hotels where she trysts with her rich and satisfied clients. She doesn’t know there’s a serial killer loose whose obsession is prostitutes, until one dark night when she senses her car is being followed by a white van as inconspicuous as a bus. Well, she’s right, and the car chase that ensues – just Diana and the van weaving at top speed through the deserted roads around Rome, pursued by Arnaud Rebotini’s breathless score – is exciting all the way up to the spectacular crash that concludes it. When she wakes up in the hospital, she’s blind. With the killer still on her trail.
Although the murders of women that occur in the course of the story quite literally go for the jugular, Dark Glasses isn’t the kind of thriller that lines up non-stop shocks from start to finish. It almost seems a little retro in pausing to develop Diana’s character when she’s forced to adapt to a sightless existence. Pastorelli plays her as a tough cookie whose bold independence and direct way of confronting life marks her as a strong, modern heroine despite her profession. In one scene, when a brutal client slaps her to the floor after she refuses to do something she calls “disgusting”, she unexpectedly turns the tables on him with a can of pepper spray, much to the audience’s delight. The fact that there’s no pimp in sight and she’s able to work on her own terms is hard to believe, but her business (which she winkingly refers to as “public relations” and “psychological therapy”) is not the focus of the story.
The film has had a long development history, and in some ways it shows. The screenplay written by Argento and Franco Ferrini, who worked together on Phenomena in the Eighties, was about to go before the cameras in 2002 when producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori filed for bankruptcy. One wonders how much the character of Diana has been updated in the ensuing twenty years. In the meantime, The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic by Finnish filmmaker Teemu Nikki has been made, winning awards for its uncompromising yet moving portrayal of a severely disabled blind man who falls victim to a gang of vicious thieves. The contrast with Diana’s confrontation of her serial killer is striking, first of all because the screenwriters give her a plucky 10-year-old Chinese orphan named Chin (Andrea Zhang) as a helpful if totally unlikely companion, along with a ferocious seeing eye dog. Secondly, because the camera never goes inside her head to allow the audience to experience even a small part of what being blind means. The result is that the final scenes of Dark Glasses are not just dated; they’re deeply unscary.
More thrilling is Diana’s unexpected encounter with a knot of water snakes in a night scene in which she and Chin try to escape the killer by wading across a river, but this is only an interlude in a messy series of long takes showing them wandering through woods and fields with the baddie somewhere nearby. Audiences should be on the lookout for Asia Argento in a supporting role, in which she is well-disguised as a calm, efficient social worker from the Society for the Blind.
Director: Dario Argento
Screenplay: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
Cast: Ilenia Pastorelli, Asia Argento, Andrea Gherpelli, Andrea Zhang, Mario Pirrello, Maria Rosaria Russo, Gennaro Iaccarino, Guglielmo Favilla, Paola Sambo
Producers: Conchita Airoldi, Laurentina Guidotti, Brahim Chioua
Associate producer: Asia Argento
Cinematography: Matteo Cocco
Production design: Marcello Di Carlo
Costume design: Guido Bongiorno
Editing: Flora Volpelière
Music: Arnaud Rebotini
Sound: Damiano Silva
Production companies: Urania Pictures (Italy), Getaway Films (France) in association with RAI Cinema, Canal+, Ciné, Vision Distribution, Sky
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special)
In Italian
90 minutes
