I've been reading the expanded edition of Maitland McDonagh's BROKEN MIRRORS/BROKEN MINDS and I've gotten to the CAT O' NINE TAILS/FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET chapter. One of the strengths of the book is due (to use a phrase I sometimes fall back on) to the depth and breadth of its analysis. Her writing, on Argento films that I'm already well-familiar with, is so impressive because it's so illuminating, shedding light on aspects of the films—thematic connections, visual and narrative codes, production history—in a way that isn't just dry essaying, but that actually adds to my understanding of films I thought I knew inside and out. (In this way, her Argento insights remind me very much of Thomas Rostock's, in his masterful audio commentaries for TENEBRAE and DEEP RED. Reading her book makes me want to seriously re-evaluate those "golden-age" Argentos that I've never been too terribly taken with, with CAT at the top of that list ...)
Making my way through the half of the chapter devoted to FOUR FLIES, I came upon this passage:
"FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET takes from THE CAT O' NINE TAILS some surprisingly specific material, particularly apparent in the way it uses certain sexual motifs; in this respect the films appear almost a pair. Incest, for example, plays a part in each film. While it's not utterly essential to the plot (some other form of aberrant sexuality could have been substituted), it is of considerable formal importance ... FOUR FLIES, of course, is driven by the notion that Nina has married her father in Roberto's guise, and there's a further link to the incestuous couplings of CAT through a tantalizing fragment of conversation between Arrosio and a doctor at the Villa Rapidi, the mental institution to which Nina was confined as a child. 'After her father died,' says the doctor, 'all symptoms of emotional disturbance disappeared. It was our opinion that the patient was completely cured. However, there's one important point I would like to emphasize: we suspected the man wasn't the patient's real father.'"A few points here, re: the previous Source Code entry linking PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK & REPULSION:
- Mimsy Farmer's appearance in FOUR FLIES in the role of Nina connects this film to PERFUME, where she plays a similar female lead, a character whose traumatic parental past is the lost information underlying (and, ultimately, explaining) all of her otherwise secret and inexplicable actions;
- Further, the "father" in PERFUME that pursues Farmer's character, from half-suppressed flashbacks to her nightmare-mined present day, is also, the flashbacks tell us, very likely not to be her real father (certainly, he is not the father in the photo that opens the film, and that connects it to the end-credit use of the photo in REPULSION).
- Still further: all three films feature key sequences with childhood photographs of their female lead—photographs that hold the submerged legend (legend, as in key to the map) that could allow the viewer (as well as the other characters in the movie) to properly navigate the mysteries in front of them.
McDonagh describes the image in FOUR FLIES as a "photograph of a child whose sex cannot be guessed." (And though it doesn't seem to follow the pattern of the photo from the other two films—showing a daughter staring off-puttingly at her father—the more I looked at the photo on the right side of the album, the more it seemed that in its smeared background I could see [in the same way you can see faces in clouds] the figure of a man standing behind his child.) Imho, the photos, esp. because of their condition, hold in them something uncanny, unsettling, that exists in the same realm as those in PERFUME and REPULSION.
McDonagh puts it this way: "Mad Nina, caught between conflicting gender messages, trapped in a displaced Oedipal triangle, is the nexus of this disordered state: all roads lead from her, and all roads lead back." In the same way, I'd argue, all roads lead either to or from the photos so key to the understanding of the Barilli and Polanski films. One film opens with the unnerving childhood photo. The other ends on it. What lies between serves as cinematic gloss (in more than one meaning of that word) on the totemic photos themselves.
