The Possessed

The Lady in the Lake is often seen as a precursor to the Giallo style that would reach it's peak in the early seventies; and I can certainly see why. However, I would say that the film is closer to a supernatural mystery film than a Giallo and it also shares a lot in common with the popular American film noir style; stemming from it's picture, execution and subject material. The film is very much of the high quality variety and director Luigi Bazzoni takes time and a lot of care to ensure that the film is haunting and mysterious as possible - which pays dividends as the plot starts to pan out. We focus on Bernard; a writer who goes to spend some time in a dilapidated hotel where he spent some time the previous year. Once he gets there, he begins searching for Tilde; a young maid he fell in love with during his previous visit, but he's surprised by the news that Tilde killed herself. However, it would appear that there is more to the apparent suicide as Bernard is shown a picture suggesting she was pregnant...

The film is directed by Luigi Bazzoni, who go on to make one of the best seventies Giallo's with the excellent The Fifth Cord as well as one of the oddest genre films with Footsteps in 1975. There's also a writer's credit for Death Laid an Egg writer-director Giulio Questi, so rather unsurprisingly - The Lady of the Lake is a rather bizarre film! It starts off simple enough and the first half of the movie is pretty easy viewing, but then things start to get a bit stranger in the second half and it becomes easy to loose the plot. It's lucky then that there's more than enough to keep the audience otherwise entertained. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous and the black and white picture allows the director to capture a real macabre and moody atmosphere. The town in which the film takes place is a masterpiece within itself - the ghostly local population in particular is memorable. The plot comes back together towards the end and the film does give closure to its central plot line. Overall, The Lady of the Lake will probably not please all viewers; but it's a very well made mystery and anyone that considers themselves a fan of Italian cinema should check it out!

Recently, I had been impressed with Bazzoni's weird offering FOOTPRINTS (1975); so, when I happened upon this even more obscure (and, by all accounts, rarer) earlier title from him, I decided to check it out – and, boy, is it a find for Euro-Cult/Art-house buffs! The film, in fact, can perhaps best be described as an arty semi-giallo; interestingly, it contains several echoes to Bazzoni's later effort: the resort town, the central hotel setting, the strange characters encountered by the hero (in FOOTPRINTS, the bewildered protagonist was a woman), the mystery revolving around a missing person – not to mention the deliberate (and deliberately-paced) oblique narrative.

What is immediately arresting here (in spite of the somewhat fuzzy quality of the print on display) is the supreme style allotted to the film's look – which is wintry, bleak and forbidding – by its two directors (incidentally, this was Rossellini's only stint in such capacity!); to this end, they wisely recruited veterans such as cinematographer Leonida Barboni (but who also adopts peculiar framing throughout, none more so that the pan in extreme close-up of a character's face with the gleaming lake for backdrop!) and production designer Luigi Scaccianoce. However, equally important to the fabric of the piece are the contributions of Renzo Rossellini (supplying an appropriately moody score) and editor Nino Baragli (whose frequent jump-cuts and seamless juxtaposition between reality, recollection and outright fantasy create a genuine and admirably disorientating effect on the viewer). Incidentally, THE POSSESSED – a misleading English title but a literal translation of the original, THE LADY OF THE LAKE, would be no less ambiguous! – was co-written (with Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini) by Giulio Questi; for the record, as a director in his own right, the latter went on to make such idiosyncratic yet haunting revisions of genre convention as the Spaghetti Western DJANGO, KILL…IF YOU LIVE, SHOOT! (1967) and the giallo DEATH LAID AN EGG (1968).

The cast is compact but exceptionally noteworthy: Peter Baldwin (very good in Dino Risi's LOVE IN ROME [1960] – here, in what I assume to be his most significant role, he's downright excellent!), Salvo Randone (as the owner of the hotel whom the hero suspects of both lechery and murder, he manages to alternate between a genial and sinister countenance throughout), Valentina Cortese (a typically fine performance, though her weather-beaten looks make it hard to convince us she's Randone's daughter…even if a reasonable age gap separates the two actors!), Philippe Leroy (having appeared in so many films from the 1960s and 1970s that I've watched in recent years and, thanks also to his remarkable versatility, the French actor has become a firm favorite of mine!), Virna Lisi (while undeniably sensual, her contribution basically amounts to an extended cameo – since her character, who seems to have turned the heads of virtually the entire male cast at some point, is already dead when the film opens and we only see the girl in flashback/fantasy sequences!) and Pia Lindstrom (a rare cinematic appearance by Ingrid Bergman's elder daughter – being similarly steeped in mystery, alas, she too is barely given time to create a flesh-and-blood character…but, then, her resultant fragile performance emerges to be all the more moving for it!).

The plot concerns an author (Baldwin) arriving off-season at a resort town he habitually retired to in order to work, hoping to meet again a servant-girl (Lisi) he's enamored of employed at the hotel run by Randone; however, he's told she's no longer there…but notices that her cloak is still hanging in the closet, follows a woman in the streets he sees wearing it (and is eventually disappointed to learn the outfit now belongs to Lisi's replacement). Typically, he decides to delve deeper into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the former maid's demise – still, Randone and his family (Cortese assists in the managing of the establishment while brother Leroy owns a butcher shop situated in the courtyard of the hotel itself and, coincidentally, has just returned from his honeymoon with wealthy but naïve and sickly bride Lindstrom) generally evade his probing. Even the only man who's willing to help at first – a hunchbacked local photographer (I'm not sure about the actor's name but his face is awfully familiar!), who presents Baldwin with a photo in which Lisi is visibly pregnant – suddenly opts out and leaves town in a hurry!; then, there's Lisi's alcoholic bum of a father who seems to have nothing of value for the hero to work on – venting the anger and frustration over his daughter's loss by bursting into vitriolic (but ineffectual) nightly rants outside the hotel windows! At one point, Lindstrom makes a weak attempt to communicate with Baldwin but, before they can meet (he had previously noticed the girl walking aimlessly by the lake at night a number of times, but never quite mustered the nerve to confront her), she too is found dead! Eventually, the hero starts to think he may have gotten it all wrong: perhaps Lisi wasn't so much a victim of circumstance (periodically abused by both father and son!) as a femme fatale who got killed simply because she was too greedy.

The final revelation then, takes things in another direction altogether; while certainly effectively handled, the scene does perhaps constitute a slight let-down – as it won't surprise anyone familiar with Mario Bava's THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1963), actually the film credited with originating the giallo tradition, in which Cortese also features

The famous writer Bernard (Peter Baldwin) travels to a small town nearby a lake to spend vacation out of season in the winter. He check in an old hotel owned by Enrico (Salvo Randone) and his daughter Irma (Valentina Cortese) expecting to meet the maid Tilde (Virna Lisi), from whom he had a crush last time he visited the town. However, he discovers that Tilde has committed suicide and when he meets the local photographer (Piero Anchisi), Bernard learns that she was pregnant. He becomes obsessed to find whether she really committed suicide and to guess what really happened. When Enrico's son Mario (Philippe Leroy) and his wife Adriana (Pia Lindstrom) arrive at the hotel, Bernard has daydreams about the fate of Tilde.

"La donna del lago", a.k.a. "The Lady of the Lake", is a dark and mysterious Italian film with a simple and inconclusive story. The black and white cinematography is magnificent, with great use of lighting and shadows. The cast is also excellent, supported by an intriguing screenplay with great narrative. Bernard's daydreams are interesting, showing what he is thinking and changing his reality many times. "La donna del lago" is for specific audiences that will certainly enjoy this type of story. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Mulher do Lago" ("The Lady of the Lake")

This early giallo has the look of Bazzoni's later The Fifth Cord and the mood of his last film Footprints On the Moon, and once again the director impresses with a mix of noir-ish visuals and people thinking a lot.

Bernardo is a burned out writer who, following a failed relationship, heads to a hotel on the edge of a lake where he was once infatuated with a maid named Tilde. He plans to take their relationship further, but only if he can find her. He should have probably asked where she was while he was on the phone booking a room because it turns out that Tilde committed suicide the previous winter. Maybe he booked through Trivago or something and didn't get the chance to speak to a real person.

Someone in town confides in Bernardo that there's a rumour going around town that as well as ingesting poison Tilde must also have accidentally slashed her own neck with a knife too, which sets off Bernardo on a quest to find out what really happened to this woman he was technically stalking. Seriously - at one point we get a flashback to Bernardo spying on Tilde getting some from a mysterious horny stranger.

The mystery deepens as certain characters in the hotel start behaving strangely. First off there's the owner's daughter Irma, who is upset that the family's reputation is shattered, then there's her brother Mario and his weird wife who barely talks and walks around the lake at midnight, then there's the owner himself, whose happy, servile façade begins to slip as Bernardo goes snooping around the place.

Although there's not a lot of action in this one the general moodiness of the piece is cranked way up. Just like the brilliant Fifth Cord, Bazzoni uses light sources a lot here and often has his actors standing in front of harsh lighting, saving the weirdest light tricks for when Bernardo is either fantasising about the suspects motives or having one of many vivid dreams. There's quite a lot to compare to Footprints on the Moon as well, with one lonely character in a deserted holiday resort trying to figure some strange puzzle out.

For a really early giallo, and for Bazzoni's debut, this is a slick, well made film. It would be a good double-bill with Libido and The Third Eye (an early giallo with all the nastiness in place).

Having been very impressed by co-director Bazzoni's subsequent "The Fifth Cord", I have been very keen to see "The Lady of the Lake" since I first heard of it four or five years ago when i read Adrian Luther Smith's Excellent "Bloody and Black Lace" - a definitive collection of giallo reviews. It appears, under the title "The Possessed" in the obscure and rare titles section, along with a superlative review. Subsequent attempts to track the title down were in vain, until I popped into El Corte Ingles on my most recent Spanish holiday and found it on Filmax's "Giallo" collection under the title "El Mujer Del Lago". This is the only DVD outing I've ever heard of and there were both pros (a fantastic anamorphic print) and cons (it's Spanish and Italian only, with Spanish subs) - the cons apply as I'm an English speaker, but I was able to manage enough Spanish (with my dictionary at hand) to navigate through this beautiful, atmospheric film in Spanish with subs showing.

It's as good as it's advance word suggests - an ice cool, incredibly shot mood piece which emerges as a giallo only in hindsight, as at the time it was filmed, the concept hadn't been formed and we were still four years away from the giallo cycle proper which was initiated by the box office success of Argento's "The Bird with the Crystal Plummage" and Martino's "The Case of the Scorpion's Tail" amongst others.

The plot: A writer returns to the small town where he had vacationed previously. he's keen to meet up with his former maid, Tilde, with whom he had enjoyed a romance previously. However, she isn't there and the locals are not keen on talking about why. As he goes through the town, casual encounters build up an atmosphere of menace as everyone seems to be brushing her untimely death under the carpet. The writer presses on in his investigations, seeking the facts behind her death and finding an awful lot of problems lying beneath the town's impassive surface, but in doing so unleashes the pitch black heart of darkness that lies within this film's conclusion.

In terms of style, this is far away from the post-Argento iconography of the giallo. There are no black leather gloved killers here, no stalk and slash killings. All of the (physical) violence occurs off camera. But this remains one of the most claustrophobic, oppressive films of it's time. Much of the drama unfolds within the walls of the hotel, with flashbacks, fantasies and the present unfolding in this space. The film it feels most like is Renais' "Last year At marienbad", but with a more defined narrative. I suspect a lot of the time shifts come from co-screenwriter Gulio Questi, who would later return to the editing styles shown here in his own films such as "Django Kill... If you live, shoot!". Bazzoni contributes his unnerving eye for architecture as counterpoint and subtext to the story (he's on a par with Michael Mann in this respect).

This is a film about love, all types of love, from the casual to the obsessive, and the film gradually cranks up the tension until the conclusion. I hope that a wider audience will be able to embrance this with a DVD release from an outfit such as No Shame or Blue Underground. In the meantime, I'd advise anyone who cares about atmospheric horror/ thriller cinema to pick up the Spanish release, which can be had for a remarkable price (I paid €8.95).