Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento

Author:McDonagh, Maitland [McDonagh, Maitland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2010-03-22T07:00:00+00:00

Through a trompe l’oeil door, colourfully: Suspiria’s internal space breaks up spectaculary.

Defying logic for effect: Suspiria’s chamber of barbed wire.

Inferno explores much the same territory as its predecessor with - if it’s possible - even less concern for the constraints of plausible fiction. Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle), a poet living in a strange New York apartment building, discovers in an old leather-bound book the legend of the Three Mothers who, from their specially constructed houses in Rome, Freiburg, and New York, generate all the misery and misfortune in the world. Convinced that she lives in one of those houses, Rose writes to her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey) - a music student in Rome - asking him to come to New York and help her investigate. Evil forces intervene; Mark’s girlfriend Sara reads the letter and is soon after hideously murdered - all that remains of Rose’s missive are some tantalizing fragments. Attempts to reach her by telephone are frustrating - the trans-Atlantic lines are more than usually unclear - and by the time Mark arrives in New York, his sister has vanished. Her friend and neighbour, the neurotic, sickly Countess Elise (Daria Nicolodi), adds to Mark’s concern with her own worries about Rose’s peculiar behaviour in recent days. Mark’s search leads him into the building’s grim corridors, hidden passages, and concealed recesses; the staff is weird, the neighbours a curious collection of cripples and miscreants, the atmosphere tense and stifling. He finally finds himself face to face with Mater Tenebrarum, Death incarnate, but manages to escape with his life while the hideous house burns around her. Unlike Suspiria, whose fairy tale underpinnings help propel the admittedly weak narrative along at a respectable pace, Inferno lacks even that logic. Its flimsy yet convoluted narrative is nothing more than an excuse for Argento to compose still more outrageous images and light them from a lunatic palette. Inferno’s appearance is not quite so extreme as Suspiria’s in some respects, and though this may be due in some part to the presence of a different Director of Photography - Romano Albani - it is principally because the film is shot in a conventional contemporary Technicolor process; the extreme saturation of colour that marked Suspiria is not in evidence, although the flamboyant compositions in colour remain. Inferno’s music track, composed by Keith Emerson (of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer), also strikes a less urgent note than Suspiria’s “relentless and obvious” (to put the worst possible construction on it, by way of Russell Davies of The Observer) score, a Goblin composition with which Argento reportedly frightened his actors into character by having it played over the otherwise empty sound stages on which much of the film was shot.32 Departing from the repetitive synthesizer sound that dominates Deep Red, Suspiria (and, later, Tenebrae), Inferno is informed by a fairly delicate piano composition that periodically bursts into Orffian hysteria, à la perpetual soundtrack favourite Carmina Burana. Inferno’s strength lies in its set pieces, some of which are exceptional in their dreamlike eeriness.

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