Argento's 3rd film, which improves on the speed ritualism of the 2nd (The Cat O'Nine Tails), but does not approach the aesthetic refinement of his 1st (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, easily among the most self-realised debuts by a horror director), is nonetheless an important work in his oeuvre. The foolish but unavoidable vacuity of the 4 Flies script, which comes to decadence when the 'meaning' of the bizarre film title unveils the identity of the killer, and evinced especially during the apathetic dialogs shared by the protag and his gf, are here and there nullified by touches of impromptu mastery. The meagerest script becomes an excuse for flashes of deadpan jazz. 4 Flies literally come to represent the significance of size in the fortuitous discovery: the more aberrant the killer's motivation - and resultingly the tinier, the more tenuous the evidence - the more apropos the disproportion of cause to menace. The killer's lengthy monologue at the end, unapologetically zany, is matched by the slowmo glassshattering beauty (literally & figuratively) of the killer's rationally irrational demise (the deus ex machina resolution in which the killer is killed off in karmic collision). Argento's meticulous attention to detail compensates for the plot's empty whole: monstrous bullets in slowmotion fly through air, magnetised to flesh; a young woman's head crashes down the stairs to her death but the camera shoots her upside down, showing her as she ascends as if she were cracking her head through a ceiling on the way to a degenerate heaven.
The film contains one of Argento's best executed murder scenes, and a model to be followed by any existing horror director, or the student of horror: a park in broad daylight, boisterous children at play, the happy noise of parents, lovers, and the elderly surround a woman who sits on a bench and waits for no good reason except to perish, we know, at the hands of the faceless assassin... then the park speakers, which had been languorously playing Argento's typical perverse children's music, abruptly stops: an evening wind picks up, the children and the people and the happy noise of life and even the broadness of daylight and the busybody sun, all disappear. A single cut is all it takes, and it is night. (Argento, the demiurge of this realm, with undisguised glee conjures the night and its shadows, causes a tall garden maze to appear into which the unfortunate woman of course walks in, and of course she knows that someone, something, is following her...) Argento sets up a clever, absorbing dichotomy of killer 1st person perspective (the arch Argento trademark), accompanied by fearsome breathing and the heavy one-two oscillation of silence & methodic leather sole steps; and close shots of the victim as she squeezes into a narrow corridor in order to evade and hide from the killer, but which seems to suffocate her as it tightens and the camera stalks her, to the tune of Morricone's heart murmuring music. The interplay of the claustrophobic shots of the victim as she futilely, wildly struggles to squeeze through the corridor, and the 1st person tracking shots of the killer on his/her patient way to the victim, are sustained so well that Argento doesn't even bother to show how the killer offs the victim: a sign of early cinematic purity, in a director who could easily lend himself to gratuity (and who eventually does give in to gratuity in his later films). Morricone's score & Argento's visuals are testament to the italian temperament: the muscular aestheticism of a sports car, the lush red of blood on patent leather shoes.
...
Undoubtedly one of Morricone's best theme songs, 'Come un madrigale':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztOnObEL5JM
No comments:
Post a Comment