“Through me you pass into the city of woe, through me
you pass into eternal pain.” In recent years the 'neo-giallo' movement
has grown, moving hand-in-hand with the re-evaluation of gialli from the 1960s,
70s, 80s, as well as the few that were released in the 1990s. Through DVD and
now Blu-Ray – distributed by high quality and dedicated labels such as Arrow
Video, 88 Films, Shameless Screen Entertainment (plus many more in various
markets around the globe) – the genre has gained a whole new audience, with
the films afforded lavish restoration and supplemental packages for
unparallelled home viewing experiences. With the love spreading for these movies
– made by filmmakers such as Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Sergio Martino (among
many others) – it was only natural that new examples of the genre
would begin to appear. Masks, Amer, The Strange Colour of Your
Body's Tears, and Yellow are all examples of this 'new old school'
of highly stylised murder mystery – and the Argentinian Francesca (from
the director of Sonno Profondo) is perhaps the one which nails the
classic style closest of all...
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screenshots…
“Mummy wants to play with you.” A young girl
gleefully prods something while her mother lovingly attends to the new baby of
the house, and that something is a dead bird – it's innards spread out,
exposed and half-decayed, and not in the slightest bit off-putting to the child
and her creepy laughter. She is the titular Francesca, whose affection for her
baby brother is, to put it mildly, probably minimal and certainly skewed. Her
attempt to roll the carriage into a pond was unsuccessful, the mother catching
the runaway pram just in time, but the mother is too late when Francesca stabs
her helpless sibling in the eye – cue an outlandish scream, high contrast
credits splashed in crimson, and the rising hysteria of a Goblin-esque synth
score.
“To get to Hell, an obol must be paid to Charon, the
ferryman.” Cut to red leather gloves dancing across a piano on a stormy
night, black heels, an identity-blocking funereal veil, chilling passages from
the Divine Comedy emanating from a reel-to-reel tape machine – and a
collection of knives and deadly, pointed objects. A gagged woman is bound to a
chair, menaced with an industrial sized needle – like a skewer for meat – and
is plucked from this mortal coil, her journey to the realm of the damned
assured with the placement of a coin atop each eye. The modus operandi is set
amidst a perverse tale, so far so gialli.
“Because of your ineffectiveness, this city is plagued
with sinners who corrupt society.” We are now, it transpires, fifteen
years on from the events of the film's opening scene and Francesca is still
missing. What has become of her? Her father Vittorio (Raul Gederlini)
is confined to a wheelchair roaming the grounds of the family villa, while her
mother Nina (Silvina Grippaldi) spends her days in bed continually dosed
with sedatives and daydreaming of her vanished daughter. However, when it is
discovered that the victim had a dark past – having defrauded two hundred
innocent people through a Ponzi scheme – Inspector Moretti (Luis Emilio
Rodriguez) and his partner Benito (Gustavo D'Alessandro) have their
work cut out for them. Who is the murderer, why are they killing, and how many
will have to perish before they solve the case? Such is the template for a
classic giallo flick.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” From
the outset, the style of Francesca wins-out above all else. While
it would have, naturally for the present era, been shot on Digital HD video,
the film has been graded with a high contrast look with saturated colours (dig
the iconic red coat with the black buttons), with a sort of
'pre-restoration' greyness to the darker areas of the images. Presented from
top to tail in Italian (credits and dialogue – with subtitles for the latter),
as well as an unusual extra wide aspect ratio of 2.55:1, it absolutely looks the
part. The only thing missing, one could argue, is a bit of 'Grindhouse-esque'
retro 'film damage' to complete the vibe. A key element to selling this
faux-70s aesthetic is the dialogue, which is dubbed and appears slightly askew
of the actor's lips (just like in the real thing). Indeed, the attention
paid to the little details is mightily impressive: conspicuous placement of J&B Whiskey,
voyeuristic POV shots, ineffective police under pressure from the damning
press, and fetishistic obsession with leather and bare flesh all ring true. Francesca
is a bold exercise in style, almost convincing enough to make viewers believe
this has been dug up from some film distributor's vault (much like the
tortured and circuitous route that Mario Bava's crime film Rabid Dogs
took before it gained a proper release). So it's a shame, then, that the
substance can't live up to the visuals, for Francesca feels like a film
that is too in love with its surface-level panache.
“The gate is the only access to the world marked by
the eternal pain. It is the city the lost race inhabits, those who knew they
were sinning and never repented, not even once for a moment before they died.”
Nicolás and Luciano Onetti's script plays with lofty literary references as the
killer's M.O. takes cues from Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy – a 14th
Century master stroke in Italian literature where deep themes of humanity's
salvation were examined, contrarily for the time, in the 'low art' style that
targeted a wide audience. That ideal of challenging themes (taboo-busting
plot lines) viewed through the lens of a populist telling (sex, gore,
action) sums up gialli well, but Francesca's flirtations with
intriguing ideas (such as the pre-requisite guilt attached to Roman
Catholicism – see the confession booth kill) ultimately falters because the
set pieces simply don't live up to expectations. Lacking the orchestrated
grandeur of Argento (Deep Red) and the sheer violence of Martino
(Torso), the murder scenes in Onetti's film – due to an evidently
tight budget – rarely splash enough grue to elicit a devious thrill, while
their execution remains mostly implied and occasionally stumbles (e.g.
Moretti's curiously sedate drive up to the villa prior to the film's climax).
Put simply, there's not enough pay-off, and even clocking in at a modest length
(the end credits roll at 69 minutes on the R2 DVD) it still feels as if
there's not enough story to fill the running time.
“Punishment has come to them, but love endures in
hell.” That all said, what has been achieved on a modest budget is
still impressive. The aesthetic has been brilliantly captured by Onetti (further
helped by some choice locations) and his team and illustrates much promise
for their future careers. If he can sort out the building of tension, the
provision of set piece pay-offs, and put more meat on the bones for the
audience to chew on (Moretti's investigation felt rather light on detective
work, red herrings, and perilous near misses), then there is a great
neo-giallo in the filmmaker's future. Be sure to stick around for a
post-credits scene, as well. It may not provide any great insight, appearing
more as a kind of non sequitur (a pre-shoot test scene, perhaps?), it
does inject a touch more perversion that might have been better placed somewhere
in the body of the main film in a suitable context. The region 2 DVD, meanwhile
(released by Matchbox Films), comes with a trailer as the only extra, so
UK audiences miss out on the featurettes found on the North American release.
There is yet to be a filmmaker to nail every aspect that would make for a truly
great and well-balanced neo-giallo, so the movement continues to be a mixed
affair, and as such Francesca should be entered with moderate
expectations from viewers, but it's certainly worth viewing at least once for
aficionados of the genre.
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