At the 9th Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival, TIM WONG sampled the middle class hell of Gabriele Muccino's Remember Me, followed by Sleepless, the latest in cold-blooded giallo from Dario Argento.


STRAIGHT OUT of middle class hell, Gabriele Muccino's Remember Me (My Love) temperamentally injects an overdose of vein-popping Italiano – a puppetry of blurry hand gestures, tantrum tennis and Monica Belluci – into the heart of Oprah Winfrey's bourgeoisie. The dollhouse of affluent living – from IKEA to Cable to the humble SUV – might be the playpen of America's self-proclaimed "talkshow queen", but that same world of monogamous materialism translates here into modern day Italy with decorative ease. What's interesting then about this film isn't the label-bashing of the career husband, his semi-housewife and their 2.5 children – something contemporary cinema seems more than obsessed with of late – but its valiant attempt to dissect the model of the 21st Century Italian "family", minus the Mafioso connotations.

In light of that reference, Remember Me's Brady Bunch – Carlo (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), long-married husband in pathetic mid-life crisis; Giulia (Laura Morante), disenfranchised wife on a stunted career comeback; Paolo (Silvio Muccino), drab self-conscious bundle of teenage angst; and Valentina (Nicoletta Romanoff), titillating roller girl-cum-gyrating sexual come-on – aren't too dissimilar from that other famous Italian (American) family, The Sopranos. And while Carlo is but a meek, non-threatening version of the James Gandolfini character, it's Giulia, bottled Lady Macbethian rage 'n all, who could just as well dethrone the current First Lady of homemakers, Carmella Soprano.

As melodrama, any meaty conflict spewed forth is the result of Carlo's vice for what Tony Soprano might call a "goomah", only she's 1) not a pay-per-view mistress, and 2) happens to be Monica Belluci. Frankly, I don't blame him. Giulia does, of course, which is the cue for a flurry of marital fits and spasms; the Italian language never so gloriously inflamed when subject to a warts 'n all shouting match. Granted, Carlo's infidelities are badly disguised – late nights out, bathroom phone conversations, sleep-overs at the "friend's" house – and as if to break the very space-time continuum of domesticated bliss itself, sets into motion a ripple effect of malcontent, regret and ultimately a good old fashioned, life-affirming ass kicking.

Strangely, I'm reminded of that seminal late-80's time warp, Back to the Future, when considering the crux of Remember Me: where life as we know it begins and ends on the cusp of a radio alarm clock. Both films also find themselves weighted firmly on the pressure point of a single, defining moment. For Marty McFly, it's the birth of his existence via the high school union of George and Loraine, that's at threat. For the Ristuccias, it's Carlo's chance encounter with an old flame that sends the theory of marriage into chaos – although for the cynically-minded, the "sitcom" idealism at hand is enough to suggest the trigger was always half-cocked, and just waiting to be pulled.

Hence, Guilia's rash confession of love for her gay theatre director, Valentina's whorish odyssey into game show notoriety, or Paolo's itchy rite-of-passage into weed parties and hormonal release – really not much more than an innate series of chemical reactions to the meltdown of a nuclear family. None really escalate beyond the comfort of the home unit either, despite the underlying threat that's usually there with these venal-whanau-affair type movies, just waiting to pounce at short notice. On the one hand, it's awfully safe; on the other, it's almost subversive for its ordinariness, with impressionable yet docile characters never quite capable of descending into violence or debauchery so often associated with "suburban cinema".

Dysfunctional families are almost a genre in themselves, and although Muccino's film can't help but tread the same folds and creases of disintegrating clans like the Burnham's of American Beauty, the jack-in-the-box this time around is the occurrence of a second, equally defining moment in Carlo's story. It's as if in confused desperation, he commandeered the De Lorean, travelled back in time, and orchestrated his own self-corrective demise – spoiling the predictability of yet another domestic Chernobyl in the process. So rather than bear-hug the conventional route of good families gone bad, the film makes a sharp left at this point, turning the fortuitousness of near-tragedy into the restoration of the middle class dream. And as real "happy" endings go, it's Carlo's forfeiting of personal fulfillment – by his own design or not – that repairs the so-called collective harmony of old, even if it's more of an illusionthan ever before. Red-blooded, soap-operatic, and particularly photogenic, Remember Me fits the Italian-melodrama like a surgical glove, and even stretches it a little for good measure.


DARIO ARGENTO's Sleepless fits a glove of a different kind: the black, leathery fetish type – a symbol of big screen "giallo", in every sense of the word. Clenching all the hallmarks of an Argento-approved playbook – badly dubbed dialogue, acrylic paint for blood, death by misogyny – this will almost certainly appear like a B-grade monster-mash to the unacquainted. But for those needing no introduction, Argento's latest is a timely break in the tide of proliferating curse movies and supernatural thrillers; a dog-eared serial killer whodunit that pretty much slots right back into the post-gothic years of Italian horror, somewhere in between Mario Bava's The Evil Eye (1963) and Argento's own first (Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970) and last (Tenebre, 1982) notable entries in the "paperback" subgenre (giallo takes its name from a distinctly yellow-jacketed series of mystery novel). Having missed the boat by 20-odd years, Sleepless will never quite live up to the standard of 70's horror icons Cat 'o Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and so on, but is true enough in spirit that the style hasn't changed at all, and the death scenes remain as encyclopedic as ever.

Debutants here might like to direct themselves to Argento's 1975 watershed, Deep Red (Profondo Rosso), possibly the perfect giallo movie. Sleepless is in fact a wobbly extension of this film, and although the rapport between the two is loose and ultimately unimportant, most would agree it's an essential primer in the subgenre and Dario Argento himself. In Deep Red, David Hemmings is in sort of post-Blow Up recovery mode, still pondering the whole life-is-a-mime epiphany in that same droll, Sherlock Holmes accent. Embroiled in another murder mystery, he represents your prototypical import actor in a film that's a blueprint for all things yellow: implausible plotting, narrative curve-balls, Nancy Drew ambitions, and the slaughter of beautiful women at the hands of a cloak 'n dagger fetishist. Although there's only brief reference of it, the killings in Deep Red turn out to be partly midget-related, which is where Sleepless – 25 years on – picks up from where the so-called "Dwarf Murders" left off.

Sleepless introduces Max von Sydon into the mix – he's the investigative peabody required for a standard giallo premise – yet has no connection to the previous film other than as a designated stopgap, whose role it is to fill in the blanks between the then and now. Seen presiding over a murder and its witness in flashback (a young boy whose mother we later learn died of musical-itis, Argento-style) this initial scene is a nutshell doctrine that surmises the only thing you need to know about this kind of film – that there's a killer, and he needs to be caught. One thing I've learnt is that you really don't watch Dario's films for the plot, and having established the obvious, it's quickly brushed aside for what ranks as one the most relentless opening 20 minutes of any film he's made, to date.

At a glance, this is just another random female victim of the first act, hunted down for the kill by a PVC psychopath – surely the calling card for any self-respecting slasher movie. What sets Argento's palette of horror apart from the rest is the execution – the flight of the camera, the baroque compositions, the broad strokes of colour, the play between light and shadow. All are present here, evident in the opening's grueling chase sequence that begins in the aftermath of a kinky sex session, moves onto the claustrophobia of a speeding train, and ends in the darkness of a rain-swept terminus – the very latter, a fitting, self-referential nod to Argento's own most famous creation, the baroque masterpiece Suspiria. Italian rock group Goblin provided the soundtrack in that film (as well as Deep Red), and although not nearly as memorable, return again with a musical pulse that's both reassuring for the fan and befitting of this unique cinematic style on a whole.

Punctuated by the aesthetics of death, the remainder of the film is fairly banal in between. It's a mixture of amateur detective work, choppy conversation and delayed violence as we wait, with the anticipation of a junkie, for the next character to be cast so emphatically aside. Much is made of Argento's genius when it comes to this; he is, after all, the man who could make being shot by a bullet – literally the most done-to-death way of being killed in all of the movies – a thing of strange, artistic beauty (see: Opera). And as perverse as it sounds, it's difficult not to come away with a sense of satisfaction, especially in the signature set-pieces – the elevator garroting, death by chimpanzee, or my personal favourite, the look-before-you-jump barbed wire pit in Suspiria (where the Goblin score is at its most effective). What I perhaps find more interesting though are the less outrageous methods; the primal devices of killing that the current horror output seems close to bereft of. So even if the genre, in an effort to out-kill all others, has exhausted the very creative possibilities of death as a means, there will always be Dario Argento. In Deep Red, it's the head scolding in water, or the advantageous use of a table corner, that really stick out. In Sleepless, it's the jaw breaking against a marble wall, or in particular, that "musical-itis" I mentioned earlier – a non-harmonic use for the flute, if ever there was one. Granted, horror fans who haven't seen an Argento film don't know quite what they're missing out on.


See also:
» Italian for Three: Ginger and Cinnamon, I Am Emma, I Like to Work