Lady of the Lake (Luigi Bazzoni, 1965)
Lady of the Lake, Luigi Bazzoni’s mid-sixties debut, is like a rough sketch for his final film, the tender and obtuse Le
Orme. It shares the ellipses and eruptions: the shadows and fissures of local (small-town/ex-pat) betrayal and breakage. They are, both, fractured little tales of lost (or imagined) connections and encounters – the trail of lonely people led by indefinite and fantastic delusions to terminal locales.
They start with empty subjects, hollow lives: a writer who takes holidays out of season and doesn’t like his own books (
Lady’s Bernard, played by Peter Baldwin); a mentally fragile, emotionally blank translator, whose stark white apartment symbolises her own internal void (Alice Cespi,
Le Orme). Bernard returns to his familiar haunt, an off-season lake-side resort town, drawn by a local hotel maid with whom he enjoyed a tantalising fling during his previous visit. “I am empty inside,” he intones to some city chick he ditches from a phone box in the opening frames of the film, while fiddling with the tatty snaps of this adored and fleeting flame.
The maid herself, a sly Continental Marilyn called Tilda (Virna Lisa), hardly appears in the film beyond a white-hot blur of erotic close-ups and cross-cuts consigned to memory and fantasy. By the time Bernard returns to town, with a jaunty Gallic spring in his step, she has been murdered – poisoned, stabbed and dumped in the lake. All that remains of her is a sexual phantom, yearned for and dreaded: her death hides explosive secrets capable of undoing the entire town, as well as Bernard’s own sense of ease and entitlement.
Lady slowly unwinds a terrible conspiracy that consumes everything in the vicinity. Nobody will talk about Tilda’s death, but it is the only thing to talk about. In the hotel where she worked and Bernard always stays (and remembers from childhood, like Alice and the hotel in Garma), Tilda was almost a member of the family — like a daughter, a sister, a niece: everybody’s sweetheart. Destroyed while pregnant, her brutal end and its unanswered questions unhinges everything: business, morality, sanity, trust, family ties. This unravelling has the same effect on Bernard as Alice’s own slow dissolution, and similar visual tricks and physical phantasms abound.
Both films are optically precise, but psychologically inexact.
Le Orme plays tricks on perception and expectation, providing empty clues and obscuring crucial codes, but also using alleys and islands, architecture and décor to establish a disorientating and subversive visual landscape and atmosphere.
Lady tries something similar with simple techniques that are crude but also elegant. Reflections in shop windows and darkroom projections obscure reality, a physical replication of Bernard’s desperation and confusion and of others in the town – out of the loop, troubled by truth, and afraid. Cut-up erotic tableaux contain several worlds of desire, regret, envy, rage, fear, love and loathing — simply by lingering on bare shoulders, or a mass of cascading Monroe locks, or the luxurious and stark foci of lip-stick and mascara. The contrast of impressionist winter landscapes (a woodland graveyard drenched in snow) and jarring expressionist imagery (an abattoir adjoined to a hotel) undermine the out-of-season repose. Even the soundtrack which, like
Le Orme, uses simple silence to startling effect, or replaces the sound of desire with eerie bird cries (hawks and herons), manages to disturb rather than affirm the calm spell.
This is all in the service of secrets, uncovered by spectators and actors, like Bernard and his hunchbacked friend Mario who owns a photography shop and pieces together several possible stories from negatives and portraits, café rumours and saloon slander. Placid but frosty, picturesque but tense, the lake-side town hides a history of sex, corruption, lies and violence, finally embodied by Tilda’s corpse. The interior of an old (resolutely un-modernised) hotel and elegant and the empty streets and alleys circumscribe and frame the unravelling and resolution of
Lady, as they do
Le Orme. Within these close physical limits, everything breaks apart.
There is a stylistic divide between the
Nouvelle Vague blur and blanch of Lady and the Technicolor Storaro thrust and grandeur of Le Orme that is a matter of technique and timing and
time — but they are more united, than divided. Bazzoni’s first and final films, and their central protagonists, flow into each other. Both deal with words (a writer and a translator) but are assaulted by visuals: pictures, buildings, unreadable events, fragments, actions, dreams, and memories. They are, together, dream-pictures: chilly, fluid, hazy, sensuous. But they are, also, stark and empty: at each centre is a whole, a lack.
Bernard and Alice have no family and seem to come from nowhere. Their memories are fragmentary or invented; we never know which, but neither do they. They are surrounded by other families in the nowhere places they return to – but these dislocated, alienated units offer nothing but an uncertain threat, only secrecy and menace.
Lady’s basic plot splits a family apart in a catastrophic manner that destroys the moral centre of an entire town; the family bond is erased from
Le Orme, or exists as mockery, perversion, hostility, emptiness. Sex is something separate, secluded and damaging: for Bernard and Alice an obsession or activity seen or spied or remembered, but not something that happens, barely a personal experience. Hard to watch, or recollect, by everyone around – and by us.
Bazzoni released this film in 1965, the year following Mario Bava’s
Blood and Black Lace, the same year as Polanski’s
Repulsion and four years after Resnais’
Last Year At Marienbad — all films with some emotional and stylistic bearing on Lady. His talented co-conspirators Franco Rossellini and Gulio Questi (
Django, Kill!, Death Laid an Egg) helped create a low-key and experimental dream-noir that dragged disparate techniques from the European avant-garde and dumped them in the pulp environs of a murder mystery. In these hands and through these eyes, the urban thriller becomes dilatory, diffuse, and poetic: even Bava did not do this. It would be fifteen years before Bazzoni tried it again, turning the by-then established giallo formula inside out by deploying Storaro’s immaculate visual reach and Balkan’s icy existential hauteur. A logic-shredder, a dream journey man, an aesthetic engineer with a lot of talented friends – Luigi is the epitome of the low-key Italian hack as artiste.
