For a long time now, Marialé (Ida Galli) has been kept drugged and
pretty much under lock and key by her husband Paolo (Luigi Pistilli) in
their vast but decaying mansion, but somehow she has managed sending
telegraphs out to all her friends inviting them to a masque - including
her former lover Massimo (Ivan Rassimov). Reluctantly, Paolo gives in to
her wish now that everyone's here anyways and plays the generous host.
Problem is, not all of Marialé's friends get along, especially those who
are in a relationship with one another, and so the first night is in equal
parts a depraved party where everyone drinks a bit too much and at least
some of the guests have something to be ashamed of the next morning, and a
ground zero for tensions of all kinds - including jealousy of course. ...
and then people start dying - of unnatural causes like stabwounds or
dogbites of course. And of course the place's phonelines are cut through,
and Osvaldo (Gengher Gatti), Paolo's servant who's sent to get the police,
is killed. Eventually, and after much to and fro, only three people are
left alive, Marialé, Massimo and Paolo (no big surprise here), and
Marialé has no real problem to convince Massimo Paolo's the killer. It
all leads to a shoot-out between Paolo and Massimo, and Paolo shoots dead
not only Massimo but also his own wife in the process - but only in self
defense I might want to add. Thing is Marialé herself was the baddie of
the piece - when she was a little child, she saw her father shoot her
mother and mom's lover, then he killed himself, and since then she
suffered from some kind of trauma that eventually led her to create a very
similar situation ... Ok, on a plot level, this movie is
probably worse, more over-constructed, confusing and confused than many
other gialli (and that's a feat, given the genre's symtomatic disregard
for logic) - and as with some of the best gialli, this is not too much of
an issue here, because the film makes up in style what it lacks in
narrative coherence, and manages to create its own aesthetic world,
somehow more related to certain films of Alain Resnais or even Federico
Fellini than any other gialli of its time. That said though it's not a
genre masterpiece nevertheless, on a narraitve level it just relies a bit
too much on genre mainstays, it's a bit short on tension, and the ending
shows a very naive understanding of Freud's writings at best and little
more. Masterpiece or not though, still well worth a look!
|