The Double

This is all most enjoyable if insubstantial. It looks good and sounds good throughout. Jean Sorel effective, as ever, without seeming to put himself too far out. Just a raised eyebrow is often all he needs to do to convey to us his thinking. Bit bewildering at times with much flashing back and forth but the two ladies help, both Lucie Bose and Ewa Aulin as mother and daughter are easy on the eye, in and out of their clothes. Many films of this time had prolonged sequences somewhere in them where half naked lovers ran along a beach or galloped horses in the surf or ran into sunlight through cornfields but this film, at times, seems to consist of just those dreamy (but insignificant) moments.

Very slow giallo which spreads the states of mind of the idle architect Giovanni (Jean Sorel, Il dolce corpo di Deborah from the same director), who lives at the expense of his industrial brother (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Sette scialli di seta gialla), and fails to gladden his young wife Lucia (Ewa Aulin, Col cuore in gola), whom he prefers deceiving with his glamour mother-in-law (Lucia Bosè, Le Testament d'Orphée). Pushed by his jealousy towards a charming and hippie American reader of Mao and Malcolm X (Sergio Doria, L'Iguana dalla lingua di fuoco), who happens to be gay, and furthermore stuck in a revolted mood which only turns into plain conformism, Giovanni commits himself in a spiral of self-destruction.

But let's begin by the end as does the movie: Giovanni is shot to death in an underground parking by a bearded killer (Antonio Pierfederici, La maschera del demonio), and in the very next scene he is naked and happy with is wife on a North African beach. For the whole film is made of flashback episodes revealing step by step the way which has lead to his murder. If the plot thus constantly looks backward to paint the events, so seems to do the film itself built as an old fashioned first timer psychological giallo, while the style has frankly already gone towards other directions. Whilst the whole cast seems to enjoy their quite everlasting holidays under the sun, the hero can conclude disenchanted: «In that case it was all done for nothing».

A great admirer of Jean Sorel I watched this unworthy rubbish, and although the mystery of the opening caught my attention the rest of the film did not. Lucia Bose, a long way away from Antonioni, I also admire, but definitely not here. Seeing Sorel I tried to focus on the great actor of ' Sandra ' directed by Visconti, and his role in Bunuel's ' Belle de Jour ' and Bolognini's ' From a Roman Balcony ' and wondered why he had accepted this mess of a scenario. This example of Italian cinema of the beginning of the 1970's showed to me how cinema was beginning to slide down into puerile eroticism (concentrating on the female body and considering the male body to be a substitute for the heterosexual males in the audience), and also into the domain of violence for its own sake with again the males in the audience having fantasies of violence of their own. But to return to the film in detail it has an appalling musical score, flashy and gimmicky camera work, and as I said I watched it for Sorel and yes, there were glimpses of the man who qualified for me as being the best actor of the previous decade. Saddening.

I saw this under the title Love Inferno about five months ago. It begins with a man, Giovanni, being shot in a parking garage. What did he do to deserve this fate? The film flashes back to show how things went wrong for this playboy. While on honeymoon in Africa, Giovanni meets the sexy mother of his (attractive) wife. Since the mother is played by Lucia Bose, I can understand the guy's predicament. The mother-in-law is, needless to say, appalled by the advances of her daughter's new husband and instead takes up with a young hippie type. Jealousy and frustration follow. I was certain where the film was going but turned out to be only partially right. Ewa Aulin, certainly no wallflower either, plays the wife. After only five months, I'm having a hard time remembering much about the film. It was okay but don't expect an erotic thriller - the film is lacking on both counts.

As a fan of gialli, I had high hopes for this one. It has a solid cast. Jean Sorel is in some of the better ones, including 'The Short Night of Glass Dolls' and 'Lizard in a Woman's Skin.' It's got an intriguing Hitchcock-esque title. Who is 'The Double'? Sadly, 'La Controfigura' just lacks the smart twists and turns of a great mystery thriller. It's not enough about who killed whom and is too much about who's doing whom.

The film starts strong, with a man being shot in a carpark. Why did it happen? Who shot him? Will he survive? Unfortunately, the next hour and a half won't shed much light on that subject. Instead, you'll spend a holiday in a really weird setting with our protagonist, who manages to make every situation weird and awkward. He's constantly jealous of his new wife while simultaneously trying to get it on with other women, and in the wrongest, most cringey ways possible.

So about three quarters of the way through the soap opera, you're probably wondering, 'what happened to our great mystery'? Well, eventually all is revealed, of course, but what did it have to do with anything else in the film? God knows. The story includes diplomats and physicists and bad guys asking, 'Where is it?', yet they're all tossed aside as useful plot points, not even used as red herrings.

'La Controfigura' is not a totally unwatchable film. The actors are decent and good looking, the locations are nice, there's some drama and intrigue. It's just that the soap opera is pretty disconnected from the actual mystery. The puzzle is missing some pieces that could have at least formed a picture.