GIALLO IDENTIKIT #012 [THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE aka IL MOSTRO DI FIRENZE (1986)]

THE BLACK GLOVES COME OFF: Though MONSTER OF FLORENCE references any number of iconic Giallo moments, the tone and movement of the film is decidedly atypical of the Argento-type most people identify with the genre. The question is: Does its deviation from established rules amount to anything interesting?

 

[This is the thirty-second post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

 
My Giallo Rating: ★★½  (out of 5)
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Meta-Giallo (aka Experimental Giallo, aka Existential Giallo)
     ii. Country Giallo 
     iii. Sleaze-Art-Sleaze Giallo
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): No  


[GIALLO BY WAY OF POLIZIOTTESCO] 
Lately I’ve been reading Roberto Curti’s ITALIAN CRIME FILMOGRAPHY, 1968-1980. In it (amidst writing that unfortunately could stand a better translation) he not only gives what must be a nearly definitive year-by-year cataloging of Poliziotteschi, but he also makes clear many of the different subgenres at play (sometimes at odds) in the larger filmic world that is the Eurocrime.
 
Two “veins” in the larger genre, according to Curti, include what he calls the “politically committed” Eurocrime and the “tough cop” Eurocrime. The “politically committed” vein “echoed the paranoid atmosphere of a country plagued with terrorism and corrupt secret services,” at times “portray[ing] infamous real events with just minimal changes” and made documentary-style “instant movies” that were meant to reflect—with an unprecedented immediacy—the social and political unrest dominating Italy’s headlines. 

They tackled (sometimes seemingly predicted) real-world chaos. The Piazza Fontana bombings, the murders of District Attorney Palermo Pietro Scaglione and Commissioner Calabresi, unchecked kidnapping and terrorist attacks. They tended to veer, politically speaking, to the left. Directors whose films typify this movement within the larger genre include Damiano Damiani (CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN, HOW TO KILL A JUDGE), Carlo Lizzani (THE VIOLENT FOUR aka BANDITS IN MILAN, SAN BABILA-8 P.M.), and Elio Petri (WE STILL KILL THE OLD WAY, INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION).

On the other hand, the “tough cop” version—“labeled as fascist by many critics”—featured “hard-boiled, gun-crazy cops, ruthless and sadistic criminals, brutal violence, heists, shoot-outs and spectacular car chases in the city streets”. All while managing to avoid “any true political colors”.

Curti argues that the “tough guy” Poliziottesco “cunningly exploited the viewer’s dissatisfaction and demand for justice, just like Italian Westerns captured their audience by exploiting violence and sadism”—that it did this while also remaining politically confused, even meaningless. One minute the tough cop would be railing against left-wing laws that tied his hands in the line of duty, that invariably freed—through political corruption, bleeding-heart reforms, institutionalized cronyism—the guilty criminals. The next he’d be preaching “tolerance like a left-wing activist” and highlighting the economic stressors that practically destined lower-class citizens to a life of crime. 

For examples, think of nearly any Eurocrime starring Maurizio Merli (as his oft-reincarnated Inspector Tanzi/Betti persona), or films like THE BIG RACKET (Fabio Testi) or A MAN CALLED MAGNUM (Luc Merenda).

That is, though Curti identifies several more forms the Eurocrime manages to take, he sees these two in a kind of constant tension with each other:

One seeks a documentary and stripped-down immediacy to tell “true” versions of the stories populating Italian newspapers each day. The other exploits an overheated, “hyper” state of spectacle.

One seeks stories shot through with liberal, left-leaning politics that challenge the corrupt and authoritarian institutions controlling Italy at the time (Church, State). While the other seeks stories shaped by exploitation set-pieces—seeks to litter its running time with exploding cars, barking guns, off-the-leash vigilantes, and as many jaw-dropping stunts as their budget could afford.
 
I say all this to say: a not dissimilar tension can be found in the Giallo genre—a tension between the set-piece, dream-logic, drenched-in-hyper-style Gialli most often identified with the likes of Argento, and the more spare, more stylistically toned down, “based on a true story” Gialli. Fans of one couldn’t be faulted for not finding an affinity with the other—or even suggesting that those done in the non-Argento style can’t be called proper Gialli at all. Cesare Ferrario’s THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE (aka, IL MOSTRO DI FIRENZE; 1986) is firmly in the non-Argento camp and purports to give a fictional but “true” retelling of a real-life (and still unsolved) case in Italy.

It does this, at times, with what feels like a dearth of overt style, with an insistence on eschewing the kind of spectacle found in an OPERA or a TENEBRAE in favor of something that feels closer to the flat and unimaginative choices too often made for TV (while watching MONSTER I was reminded of Sergio Martino’s 1993 TV miniseries PRIVATE CRIMES, only nominally a Giallo; and only nominally in the Giallo style). MONSTER is also, I’d argue, too elusive for its own good—denying any and all “solution,” “resolution,” “narrative payoff” for the mysteries it tries to involve the viewer in.

But:

In its own understated (and, yes, *unsuccessful*) way, it experiments with the Giallo form, dividing the film into two halves that compete with each other by presenting two routes to narrative “truth” (even if the arrival of that truth is only ever postponed):

The first is the procedural investigation. The second, the “facts” of the case as rewritten, scene-by-scene, by a novelist character who is part of the very film he’s writing. It’s a film that could play just as easily on a double-bill with 1975’s DAS NETZ, 1971’s BLOODSTAINED BUTTERFLY, and the Lizzani’s aforementioned Eurocrime, BANDITS IN MILAN (the first half of both films, for instance, consist of an episodic nature that re-creates past crimes and the events leading up to them). That it is less successful, less engaging, less *everything* than any of those three movies is unfortunate, but not fatal (at least not for the Giallo completist in me).
 
(I’ve also read that it is a cinematic sibling to another, much more graphic telling of these same events, THE KILLER IS STILL AMONG US, also from 1986. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to track that one down as of yet.)

A CLASSIC GIALLO POV ... IN A NOT-SO-CLASSIC GIALLO: The murder that opens the film, at first shot from the killer’s perspective. It sets both the template for each killing, and the non-Argento tone the film is to follow.

[PART 1: THE AIMLESS PROCEDURAL]
The film begins with one of the Monster’s crimes, his murder of a couple in the woods that he attacks while they’re making love in a tent. It’s a particularly grisly attack, the killer first emptying his gun into the two naked lovers, then using a knife to finish off the man who has, despite being riddled with five bullets, attempted to stumble his way out of the woods and to help.

In this first murder we also get the most important (and repugnant) part of the Monster’s ritual: his removal of the “left breast” and “pubis” of his female victims. That the film shows this ritual dismemberment in a way that hides what’s actually taking place—only later, through exposition delivered by the cops, do we realize what we were watching—gives perhaps the first clue the tact that most of the film will take. I.e., an elusive, removed, even aloof rendition of the events:

As the camera retreats from the killer (pulling back in transitions that almost border on a dream-wipe technique), we have less and less idea what it is he’s doing in the obscured insides of the tent.

There is no closeup shot of a Giallo killer using a knife to stab his female victim’s genitals (a la WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? or BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE [or, let’s be honest, many other, more tasteless exploitation examples). There is no, though the scene has plenty of gore up until this point, long, lingering, refusing-to-blink camera staring at the truly gruesome violation of the corpse (a la, among others, Fulci).

Instead it’s an example of the film’s stylistic elusiveness—an unwillingness to show or make concrete almost anything about the mystery. It’s a potentially interesting technique, experimental in its “anti-” tone (re: an audience’s genre expectations), but one whose cumulative effect in this movie is to make the whole thing feel blank. Uninvolved. Often impossible to engage with. (Certainly never gripping or suspenseful or tense. In this way, it is a failed version of DAS NETZ. Not only because NETZ also trades in the non-Argento version of the Gialli, but because both films structure their story with flashbacks that are the fictionalized retelling of a serial killer’s exploits over many years. And both use a book being written by a neglected, stopped-up writer as their primary frame story.) 

The further failure of this procedural half is to set the audience up to expect several plot twists and payoffs. First, there’s Gabriele Tinti’s reporter character, who arrives at the scene of the crime in dark-orange shades (glasses that made him look so different, I almost didn’t realize who he was) and proceeds to order around an entourage of junior photographers and reporters. His entrance in the film makes him seem important, and seems to set him up for some key role in the solving of the mystery.

Instead, he disappears from the film for nearly an hour, and only reappears to have a brief dinner scene with two other characters (a dinner scene full of meaningless dialogue and zero character development), so that his character’s presence in the film adds up, narratively, to nothing.

Gabriele Tinti to no purpose ... he might as well not be in the movie.

The two characters who join him for dinner are the main surrogates for the audience. One is fellow reporter Giulia (played by Bettina Giovannini). The other is her lover, a novelist who has half-heartedly undertaken a book about the Monster’s killing spree (Andreas Ackerman, played by genre blank Leonard Mann). In these opening scenes, the film spends a fair amount of time priming the audience to suspect that Andreas may in fact be the Monster himself. It seems to be more than just writer’s block that prevents him from finishing his book on the killings (considering an entire year passes between each murder, for 16 long years, one wonders what he does with his downtime). 

E.g., when Giulia leaves the crime scene and calls home to check in with Andreas, we’re shown an empty desk, his unattended typewriter, and the unanswered ringing of the phone. There’s a murderer loose, and this tortured writer is nowhere to be found:

Later, when Giulia goes to his apartment, he’s still missing (we learn later in the scene that he’s been unreachable for two days, more than enough time for him to have committed the latest murders):

It’s possible to read Giulia's unease in the scene as not just concern over her lover having gone missing for two days, but as real suspicion. We learn from the conversation that follows (shot with no light in the room but that cast by the desk lamp) that Andreas is a brooding, “strange,” tortured-artist type. That he’s developed an unhealthy obsession with the murders. An obsession that has both dominated and stalled his life. 

Our suspicion of him only grows, when Giulia describes seeing the bodies at the crime scene:

“That beast has killed again, just like you [Andreas] imagined it. I had a strange feeling today, over there at the woods. I had the impression that I was witnessing something I was familiar with. Something that … you had already described to me. Something you had already predicted with your imagination.”

Later in that same scene, after Giulia leaves him at his desk, Andreas gazes out the window of his apartment and appears to actually see glimpses of the crime that we watched at the start of the film. If we aren’t to read him as a pseudo-psychic profiler in the same vein as, say, MILLENIUM’s Frank Black, then we almost have to assume that he has some self-incriminating connection to the killings.

But this goes nowhere. There is never any case built up against him; nor is the notion that his writing is somehow intuiting or predicting the crimes developed in a compelling way. The second half of the film *is* structured as a kind of mental projection of the killer and his past as imagined in Andreas’ book. But it’s so muddled, so muted, so generic, that engaging with this narrative experimentation is hardly ever an option. 

Even when the film tries to shake off its too-restrained, too-meandering vibe and instead go for obvious style, the results are just never that compelling. 

SOME SLIGHT STABS AT STYLE: There are a number of transitions that exist to infuse the film with memorable style. When Andreas tries to walk through the first murder in his head—using a toy car and two cigarette lighters to represent the people at the scene of the crime—he at one point becomes frustrated with his reconstruction and throws one of the lighters (representing the killer) into the trash. The lighter landing in the trash can cuts to the killer’s gun—back at the imagined scene of the crime—landing on the ground.

Another subtle touch (again, perhaps *too* subtle) in this sequence: When Andreas imagines the murder, one of the victims slumps over in the car. Her arm catches the car’s turn signal and switches it on. The camera lingers on the blinking orange signal before returning to Andreas in his apartment. When it does cut back to him, he’s holding one of the lighters behind his back, flicking its orange flame (that matches the orange turn signal) off and on.

As the first section of the film ends, we also get a brief riff on Italy’s Gothic past: Andreas leaves his apartment and visits the scene of the attack that opened the film. While there, in the woods, he finds the reflecting pool where the Monster stripped off his black gloves and washed the blood from his hands. He stops to stare at his reflection and, when he does, the reflection of the Monster suddenly appears next to him in the water. But when he looks up from the water, there’s nobody.

Finally, hundreds of feet away, he sees the man escorting a mysterious old crone into the back of a car (earlier he had glimpsed the couple in a theater, the woman wearing a very theatrical, almost occult-looking feathered coat). It is physically impossible that the man could have covered such a distance in the time that’s elapsed. Unless he’s some sort of phantasm. Or just in Andreas’ head. (A thought that makes the second half of the movie possible).

[PART 2: THE FICTION WRITER’S DAYDREAM]
I’ve talked about the notion of “Art as Trigger” on this site before. Usually in terms of a piece of art in a Giallo or Krimi narrative serving as the traumatic object that triggers the killer’s spree. Think the painting in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. Or the statue in BIRD’s source material THE SCREAMING MIMI. Or the uncanny painting of Karin Dor’s mother in ZIMMER 13. 

Here art is a different kind of trigger: It is the thing that triggers—that makes possible the existence of—the film’s second half. If not for the book being written by Andreas (himself a fictional character in the film), we wouldn’t have the second half of the movie. His book—his mental projection of its contents onto the otherwise unsolved story—gives the second half its shape. All the personal details of the Monster—what he looks like, where he comes from, why he’s been driven to these yearly murders—are nothing but inventions by Andreas’ author character. There is no “objective” evidence to back up or verify his version of events. There are no clues that get connected because of his groundbreaking research—no new discovery or break in the case because it turns out his intuitions are true. The second half of the film, though still shot with the first half’s largely documentary- or TV-style flatness, is nothing but an extended reverie in the mind of of the author. Maybe the characters we see—the Monster, his mother, his impotent and strange father—don’t exist at all, except as Andreas’ inventions.

On paper, this sounds innovative and a little brilliant. But again the execution lets it down. Again, the scenes we watch feel aimless—fail to *accumulate*: accumulate meaning, accumulate tension, accumulate any real dramatic weight.

We get scenes from the Monster’s childhood meant to show us the scene of his “originary” trauma. In their set-dressing they very much remind one of Carlo’s childhood flashbacks in Argento’s DEEP RED: there is the ancient, dilapidated Gothic villa; a traumatic childhood incident between mother and child that takes place during Christmas; a diegetic use of music on the soundtrack. Etc. But there’s nothing of the resonance, the indelible style, the displacing weight of direction and execution that we’ve come to expect in the best Gialli.  

Even when the film returns to overt stylization, it feels like it never quite “gets there”:

A series of match cuts show the adult Monster reliving his past self’s traumatic discovery of his parent’s sexuality.

This flashback-among-flashbacks, his witnessing of his parents’ deviant sexual practices, is clearly meant as some sort of counterpoint (and explanation for) his murders. Surely, the flashback suggests, it is no accident that every couple the Monster murders is murdered while in flagrante. That this is a compulsion triggered by a murky, faux-Oedipal relationship with (especially) his mother. But ... it only ever feels like a rough draft. A thumbnail of what the film should be getting at. Even—if one wants to give the filmmakers as little credit as possible—a copy-and-paste job from countless Gialli past.

It’s precisely this inability of the film to successfully flesh out anything—to successfully pursue any of the stories it half-heartedly tells—to successfully “answer” even the smallest mystery it poses—that marks it as a failure. And a frustrating watch. 

Just as the Monster recoils from the lovers who chase him—once he has them alone in his car, parked in the middle of nowhere, under cover of dark, with nothing to stop him from consummating his lust but his own emotional ineptness—so the film seems to absolutely shrink from any hint of resolution.

In the case of the killer, it is his impotence (caused, our novelist no-hero fantasizes, because of his mommy issues) that forces him to shrink from the women throwing themselves at him. In the case of the film, (I’d argue) it’s an insurmountable lack of imagination. A default attitude that makes the film always less than the ideas it fails to pursue. 

Leonard Jacobs

July, 2015

Note: I watched the Blu-ray version as released by Germany’s filmArt. The disc offers two versions of the film, a shorter Italian cut that contains some low-quality inserts, and a longer “International” cut, which clocks in at 101 min. There's an opening title card in German that I assume discusses the differences, but the major one I noticed—other than the visual quality seemed better throughout on the longer version—comes during one of the murders, where we get additional scenes of the Monster dragging a dead female victim back and placing her in a car. Where he proceeds to practice his ritual of dismemberment (again, it's shot in an oblique manner, with the camera appearing to be placed beneath the car). I suspect there are other, more minute differences, but this sequence seems to be the main one. 

Both German and Italian soundtracks are offered, with English subs for both. The German track definitely is the higher quality, with the Italian track suffering from a persistent hiss from start to finish. Even with that problem, I watched both versions in Italian.

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: German filmArt Blu-ray | LANGUAGE: Italian soundtrack with English subs | DIRECTOR: Cesare Ferrario  | WRITER(S): Cesare Ferrario, Fulvio Ricciardi, Mario Spezi  | MUSIC: Paolo Rustichelli  | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Claudio Cirillo | CAST: Leonard Mann (Andreas Ackerman); Bettina Giovannini (Giulia); Gabriele Tinti (Enrico); Francesca Muzio; Federico Pacifici; Alberto Di Stasio; Anna Orso (Mother of a victim); Lydia Mancinelli; Antonio Ballerio; Gil Baroni