GIALLO IDENTIKIT #002 [SONNO PROFONDO, aka DEEP SLEEP (2013)]

Shake the hand called "homage".

[Note: This is the fourth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing our favorite Krimis and Gialli (some of the reviews started as rough drafts on my Letterboxd account). As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

My Giallo Rating: ★★★☆☆
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Neo-Giallo
     ii. Sleaze Giallo 
    iii. Meta-Giallo (aka, Experimental Giallo)
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): No (Letterboxd List) 


Luciano Onetti's SONNO PROFONDO (aka, DEEP SLEEP) actually feels like it has as much to do with 2009's arhouse-Giallo-dreamscape AMER as any neo movie “filmed in the style of Italian Giallo films” (as the back of the DVD states). Irrational, hyper-stylized images wash over each other with little or no exposition (and, when that exposition comes—a news broadcast left playing on a television, in the background—you get the feeling that the images aren’t really being broadcast on the television, but from one of the character’s brains; the lack of dialogue for the majority of the movie reinforces this unreal, made-up quality). 

What are we looking at exactly? I thought both of the undulating (and unidentified) red mass in the opening credits of LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN and the churning "brain shots" in OPERA.

This associative seepage of a sleeping or (day)dreaming mind, like in AMER, provides the skeleton of a plot (an amorphous, jellyfish skeleton, but still), one whose A to B to C movement can be guessed at and summarized, if not exactly understood in a straightforward, rational way. In AMER the “plot” details are made easier to guess (or project) because of the clear chronological progress of the main character—in the first episode she is a child; in the second, a coming-of-age teenager; in the third, a woman haunted by what has occurred in the first two episodes, returning to the mysterious site of both her past life (and its past dreams).

Sexual imagery much?

SP doesn’t provide these kinds of signposts plunked down every so many minutes, and thus exists in a state that feels that much more suspended (or fluid) re: its “meaning”. What we do get is that parade of images, done in the Giallo style. The opening murder, which occurs between the credits, gives us slick, stylized pornography being obsessively handled by the killer as he prepares to track his victim; clipped inserts of his victim in her apartment dressing in provocative lingerie; the killer’s pov-cam, complete with close-ups of his stitched, black gloves looking up his victim’s name in the lobby of her apartment.

Three stages of stalking. 

The staging of this murder is one thing that feels immediately problematic about the movie, as it opens it up (in a fairly explicit way) to those age-old knocks against the genre—also the slasher genre, plenty of others. I.e., the movie largely denies the identity of the first, female victim *as a person* because the camera persistently avoids showing her face. In fact it only shows sections of her body (sexualized and objectified, it need not even be pointed out): 

She dons skimpy lingerie as if on display and then proceeds to pleasure herself up until the point of her death. The explicitness and duration of the masturbation shown onscreen certainly pushes the movie further into “exploitation,” even if one would argue that it’s “arthouse exploitation”; she is only ever presented as a collection of anatomical parts, which is problematic in pretty obvious ways, esp. in the absence of any kind of self-awareness/critique on the movie’s part. 

And maybe it's because of the number of Argento films I've watched lately, but a ton of the influence here (quoted images, cribbed moments, familiar compositions [musical and otherwise]) seems to come directly from his genre-defining work:

 

Same "still photograph" technique used during the stalking of at least two victims in Argento's BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE.

Drawing on DEEP RED.

Again.

And again.

Whiffs of both Carlo's knife in DEEP RED and the OPERA killer washing off the bracelet in the fountain after he murders the seamstress character.

The razor blade taped to the mouth of the dead nurse recalls both the killer in STENDHAL SYNDROME—how he keeps a razor blade seemingly always secreted in his mouth (he shows it to Asia Argento's character at least twice, twirling it manically with his tongue) and the needles taped to Cristina Marsillach's eyes in OPERA.

Architect Varelli's talk-box from INFERNO.

The TENEBRAE envelope.

The TENEBRAE eye.

The TENEBRAE opening.

After the first murder, the killer suddenly becomes the one being targeted. The back of the DVD puts it this way: “After murdering a woman, a killer that is traumatized from his childhood memories gets a mysterious envelope slipped under his door. The hunter becomes the prey when he finds out that the envelope contains photos that show him killing the young woman.” The use of envelopes evokes a movie like TENEBRAE, as does this movie's notion of multiple killers whose identities are hidden within the plot. The traumatizing “childhood memories” evoke just about every post-Argento Giallo I can think of, with *the* quintessential childhood traumatic scene arguably being the one with young Carlo in DEEP RED.

The question then becomes: What does this movie do with all of these pre-existing narrative pieces? Does it manage to out-AMER AMER (when it comes to abstract shuffling of genre imagery, narrative experimentation, etc.)? Does its homage manage to surpass homage and become a standalone, whole-functioning neo-Giallo (something along the lines of TULPA, which though let down by its momentum-sucking [also slightly head-scratching] ending, stands as maybe the most successful attempt to make an actual Giallo—as opposed to a Giallo homage—in the past several years)?

Yes and no I’d say. There are sections that are inspired. Sections like this one:

After the third murder, the killer applies lipstick to his bandaged mask. This becomes important in the climax of the film because 1. you realize that he is, in this moment, identifying with the one person actually killed in the film (hinting at his deeper relationship with her) and 2. the bandages give us the final clue to where the killer really is (i.e., in a hospital, in a coma, recovering from a near-fatal car crash—the “Deep Sleep” of the title is drawing near). In these moments the film takes the collage of sometimes random-feeling imagery and puts it in service to "meaning" and "plot". This gives way to him, in his coma, in the hospital.

Or the two or three sequences that foreground the notion of images being broadcast (television broadcasts, dreams broadcast from the killer's head):

Are we to take this information as true, as reliable exposition, or just another delirious red herring?

Tuning in the killer's brain.

What gets tuned in (old stag films).

Or the first "unmasking" of the killer's identity:

Of course the killer, when unmasked, turns out to be another blank, another stand-in, another borrowed signifier from the Giallo past.

Another strength is the music. From the modern score made to sound vintage, to the reappropriation of found pieces of music (most notably one by Enrico Caruso). Its use is esp. effective when it's used to make clear which killer's perspective we are watching. There's a section where we realize we're watching the second killer stalk the first only because the second killer is the one listening to Caruso (whose music becomes that character's personal theme). In other places (the first hospital stalk-and-scene), the thrumming momentum and pulse that it injects into the movie helps offset meandering and/or redundant imagery.

But there are other sections that feel (to borrow a phrase from an old professor) like they suffer from “a poverty of the imagination”. Some of the “listing dream cam” sequences feel padded out (in a film that's only 67 minutes to begin with). The near-nausea-inducing crawl and pitch returns over and over to the same set of objets d'art—cemetery busts, artificial and sculpted flowers, public statuary, intricate architecture, “creepy” dolls—almost to the point of nullifying any dramatic or stylistic effect they might've possessed. And placing the whole story within the confines of an anesthetized patient's coma dreams seems obvious, and feels not only guessable but even telegraphed from the title forward.  

Ditto with the “childhood trauma” sections, which veer from heavy-handed sexual imagery (heavy-handed because of their repetition, if not their actual content), to uninspired “filming of toy dolls meant to be creepy” that mostly never is.

The other shortcoming is that certain sections wear their low-budget-ness in distracting ways. Which is, interestingly, something that can never really be said of AMER; the atmosphere and caked-on style always makes it feel like a film with higher production values than its budget could likely afford. The low-budget clunk that shows through here is only a negative to the degree that it dilutes the veneer (of an experience, a mood, a dream) of what is otherwise an often-atmospheric watch.

Certainly stands up as an earnest attempt to recreate what was so hypnotic and absorbing about the best "golden age" Gialli, even if it feels like it could've been stronger at half the running time.

Added, outside the Top 50, to the ever-growing Giallo list over at Letterboxd.

Leonard Jacobs

September, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The BRINK Region 1 DVD | LANGUAGE: Italian with English subs | DIRECTOR: Luciano Onetti | WRITER(S): Luciano Onetti | MUSIC: Luciano Onetti, Enrico Caruso | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Luciano Onetti | CAST: Luciano Onetti (1); Daiana García (2); Silvia Duhalde (3)

The director speaks. In the interview, he mentions that the movie didn't have a traditional script, but that most of the scenes were improvised (a combination of what unique, unforeseen opportunities were provided by each location and a loosely defined set of seed ideas). I have to think that this is at least part of the reason why the movie's narrative seems, at times, both padded-out and slight.