So Sweet... So Perverse

Caroll Baker :from Elia Kazan and John Ford to Umberto Lanzi:what a fall!to be fair,you must underline she played opposite Nicholson -quite well- in the overlooked "ironweed" ;this is not the kind of movie Jean Louis Trintignant must be very proud of !two years after Claude Chabrol's "Les Biches " in which he slept with two bisexual women too.

The first part recalls a poor man's Chabrol,depicting the luxury world of the bourgeoisie .Trintignant ,a very earnest thespian,seems ill at ease ,but the women often strip bare ,to the viewer's great enjoyment.

The second part is Lenzi trying to make his own "Diaboliques" :the heroine 's first name is Nicole ,like in Clouzot's classic ;it's almost absolute plagiarism -except for the mediocre ending- ,including the "clues" Baker scatters to frighten her mate and to make her believe that her dear husband might possibly be still alive .

Take Dario Argento's movies instead:their screenplays ,though influenced by Hitchcock ,are much more exciting and original.

The giallo may have been pioneered by the great Mario Bava and spectacularly refined by Dario Argento, but Umberto Lenzi was developing the techniques and stylings we now know and love from the mid-1960s. Before he became known for schlocky horror trash like Eaten Alive!, Nightmare City and Cannibal Ferox, Lenzi was toying with rich socialites and exploring pulpy, dime-store stories that often involved ridiculous, labyrinthine plots, psychedelic interiors, and beautiful, untrustworthy women. These are all ingredients of the giallo, and some of these early Lenzi efforts hint at a director with an eye for kitschy visuals, something that certainly doesn't come to mind when you watch a native tribesman scalp a poor traveller in the despicable Cannibal Ferox. These eye-catching visuals are certainly present in his 1969 film So Sweet... So Perverse, but there isn't much else to hold the attention in this plodding soap opera.

Handsome, jet-setting socialite Jean Reynaud (Jean-Louis Trintignant) enjoys a lavish lifestyle of cocktail parties and shooting ranges, but he has grown bored and frustrated with the lack of passion in his marriage to the beautiful Danielle (Erika Blanc). To counter this, Jean sleeps with anybody who happens to catch his eye, including his friend Helene (Helga Line), and his head is turned by the woman who has just moved upstairs, Nicole (Carroll Baker). When he hears screams coming from above, he rushes to Nicole's aid, learning that she is stuck in an abusive sexual relationship with her husband Klaus (Horst Frank). As they spend more time together, the couple inevitably fall in love, yet whenever they escape for a weekend, Klaus always manages to track them down. After a night of passion, Nicole reveals that she and Klaus have actually been paid a hefty sum to lure in and eventually kill Jean, but that the one doing the hiring has not yet revealed themselves.

With such a cool-sounding title (yet another famous trait of the gialli), there is nothing sweet and little perverse about the film itself. Argento eventually set a high standard for story-telling and the slow-building of tension within a vital set-piece, and the likes of Lucio Fulci and Sergio Martino added gory violence and a graceful style into the mix, but So Sweet... So Perverse is frustratingly tame, failing to ignite much interest in the plot or generate any excitement when events take a more sinister tone. Where Lenzi ultimately excels is in the glossy cinematography and dazzling interiors, which are garish enough to amusingly satirise the world of these detached characters and their materialistic lifestyles. Images of sun-drenched locations, expensive suits and beautiful, provocative women add a sleazy glamour and seductive glaze to the film, a hedonistic way-of-life Lenzi is happy to indulge as he shrewdly condemns it. It isn't quite enough to prevent So Sweet... So Perverse from becoming little more than a curious cinematic artefact, that ultimately paved the way for better directors to come along and take this new genre by the scruff.

It seems that prior to Dario Argento's The Bird With The Crystal Plumage that normal template for gialli was the 'mystery amongst devious people' rather than the 'loads of babes being sliced up'. This is yet another one of those films, with a rather low body count (two!).

Jean (he's a fanny rat, but hard to like, because he's French), is a rich playboy who is not getting any of his wife (Erika Blanc - she looks like David Bowie), so looks for other avenues to explore. When the film opens, he's banging his mate's wife, but soon he discovers a new blonde has moved into the apartment above his.

There's something strange going with this new blonde too, because Jean is hearing the scraping of furniture and what sounds like someone being slapped around, but when he goes to the front door of his new neighbour, no one answers. When he does finally get to meet her she claims that her boyfriend Klaus loves beating her up and stuff.

Soon the two fall in love (queue montage!) much to the dismay of Blanc and the delight of Klaus, and it's roughly about the halfway mark that the twists start happening so I'll stop there. Needless to say that one character goes from being vulnerable to evil, allegiances changes again and again and the hippy vibe of the late sixties shines through loud and clear.

However, Lenzi seems to have had a vision of the state of Italian film ten years later and injected the film with scenes that make no sense whatsoever, for instance the credits sequence. Jean drives about with a rifle in his car and we get flashes of one of his lovers but this has nothing to do with the rest of the film. Plus, Carrol Baker has a velvet lined cabinet in her apartment full of instruments of torture. This has nothing to do with anything either.

On the other side, Lenzi also injects an amazingly high amount of style into the film too, what with an early example of the use of primary colours (soon to be a trend in the gialli) - there's one scene that's stands out when Jean is forced to snog Carrol Baker while someone keeps changing the lighting to various colours, Nicely done.

Wikipedia calls this a giallo film, which I don't entirely see. I guess giallo doesn't have to be horror, but still. I guess the closer it leans into giallo stuff, the better So Sweet...So Perverse. There are some really feverish and bizarre scenes that play out in a zone that's somewhere between dream and nightmare. When things get more focused on the drama (all around a scheme that involves murder and infidelity), it's appropriately silly and heightened. It doesn't push those things too far, to the point where the film starts becoming an accidental parody of itself, but it comes fairly close in any event.

I came away from it not feeling hugely enthusiastic, but for some of its offbeat energy, a few sequences, and an undeniable sense of style, I also can't call it bad.

Umberto Lenzi Giallo's range in quality from sublime to trash, but his earlier genre entries tended to be the best; and So Sweet...So Perverse is certainly at the higher end of Lenzi's Giallo achievements. One of the trademarks of Giallo is a high dosage of sex scenes; but despite the fact that this film has the word 'perverse' in it's title; So Sweet...So Perverse is actually not all that perverse at all, especially not by Giallo standards. Rather, the film focuses more on the plot details than perversity, and it just about serves it well. Italian directors were famous for ripping of successful films from other countries, and the plot here is clearly lifted from the French classic 'Les Diaboliques'. We focus on a couple with marital problems; Jean and Danielle. When Jean hears a woman screaming in the upstairs apartment one day, he immediately decides to investigate. There he finds Nicole; a woman frightened of her boyfriend Klaus. The pair soon begin to fall in love, but it later transpires that this was just a trap set to snare Jean...

So Sweet...So Perverse is a classy little thriller and much unlike later Lenzi Giallo's such as Eyeball, almost everything about the film is well done. The film benefits from a good cast, which feature early Lenzi muse Carroll Baker in the central female. Baker's role here initially appears to be a lot like her role in the earlier 'Orgasmo', but she soon gets to switch to a more interesting character. Baker is joined by the sexy Erika Blanc, and like most Giallo's with two sexy leading women; the pair do get to get it on, although you shouldn't go in expecting a full blown lesbian sex scene. Jean-Louis Trintignant rounds off the cast, but isn't given as much to do as the ladies. The plot does get a bit slow at times, but the film never slows down to the point of becoming boring. The second half is much more exciting than the first as that is when the plot gets into full flow. When the twists start to come into play, So Sweet...So Perverse really is an intriguing thriller and unlike many Giallo's, this one also features an ending that wraps most of the plot up nicely. This film is highly recommended to Giallo fans!