Maxance Vincent
There’s no better feeling than sitting down in front of a cinema, the lights go down, the projector turns on, and you’re immediately dazzled by what’s in front of you. So blown away that you can’t take your eyes off the screen for the entire runtime, afraid you’ll miss out on the visual developments, such a staggering achievement in image-making takes. Your jaw is on the floor in pure disbelief, understanding where the filmmakers take their inspiration from, yet transcend the simple homage to newer, more psychologically riveting horizons.
This was my gut reaction to Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort), which had its Canadian Premiere at the Fantasia International Festival after a debut at the 75th annual Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year. Blowing audiences away is part of Cattet and Forzani’s M.O. and the two are no stranger to films built entirely on the visual foundations that shaped their conceptions of cinema, from the giallo-inspired Amer to the Western Let the Corpses Tan.
In Reflection in a Dead Diamond, the Belgian duo take their primary foundation from the 1960s Eurospy films, specifically Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, as we observe a fragmented story where the past communicates with the present, until things start to get blurred even further and nothing entirely makes sense. At face-value, the conceit is simple: John Diman (Fabio Testi), a retired spy, begins to have visions of his past life in the 1960s (where he’s played by Yannick Reiner). On vacation in the French Riviera, it’s as if his life is flashing back before his eyes, but not in rapid succession, as the process that leads him to his finality is much slower and painful for him to recall.
Rather, sounds or symbols make him recall who he was and what he did before he decided to leave it all behind. It’s a constant back-and-forth between the life he carries, as a retired old man ruminating on his time on Earth before it eventually comes to an end, and the life of danger he carried when on missions of immense urgency. However, Cattet and Forzani take it a step further and blur the lines between reality and fiction by making John a character in a film series called “John D,” where he is the star of his own spy adventures until he is eclipsed by a mysterious masked figure known only as “Serpentik” (this is where the Bava reference comes into play).
Is he living in a movie? Is John’s “real” life a fabrication of the films he watched while he was younger, or was he genuinely a spy who now fears that his past enemies have come to “finish the job” and eliminate him once and for all? These are the questions Cattet and Forzani pose in their 87-minute feature, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions based on how they associate the past and present-day stories with the overarching central thematic underpinning of reflection. John’s life is a reflection, whether real or fictional, and that reflection will soon blow back in front of him before a title card with the words “THE END” appears to announce his impending departure.
After that, it’s hard to make sense of what’s going on. There are characters who wear masks (within masks within masks), the film itself is a film within a film (within a film), and the aesthetic changes at every second. Some sections are closely emulating James Bond-esque textures, such as car chases entirely captured on soundstages with rear projections (think of Dr. No), while others are more experimental and dynamic. The film often becomes expressionistic and explodes with color, until the frame freezes and turns into a comic book panel. The camera then suddenly crashes into discombobulating angles, and figures from known works of art begin to appear within the film’s diegesis.
Simply put, it’s a pure assault to the senses that never holds your hand and instead encourages you to make the connections between each fragment of John Diman’s story on your own. If you’re not on board with its first two minutes, where Cattet and Forzani flip the ’60s opening credits to their head, by sinking it underwater, chances are you’re not going to like the rest of it and may get even irritated by how its story is presented and how the filmmakers explain virtually nothing, not even contextualizing who this mythic figure in espionage is.
That said, if you surrender yourself to their formal explosion, you may be inclined to think Reflection in a Dead Diamond is the year’s best film. None of their homages feels egregious. Cattet and Forzani proudly wear their influences on their sleeves and attempt to utilize them in this self-reflexive examination of a spy who has lived a life full of regrets and is only now realizing how regretful his entire meaningless existence has been. The man is currently sipping martinis in the French Riviera, with no money in his bank account, and sits in front of the beach, hoping for some form of meaning in the old age he has now reached, but that meaning is nowhere to be found. It’s a profoundly sad film that quietly haunts you as you begin to unpeel its layers once you remove the in-your-face maximalism of Cattet and Forzani’s approach.
Because as hilariously over-the-top as the film may be (some sequences involve an eye-shaped ring that can warp the mind, and a costume change that had the entire Fantasia audience in pure stitches), Cattet and Forzani ensure we pay attention to why they’re utilizing so many stylistic flourishes to hold our breaths. John hasn’t lived a life he’s proud of, irrespective of the grandiose, world-saving missions he’s been on. As we sit (that may be an exaggeration, since each shot doesn’t last more than two seconds, but still) with John, we begin to notice that the façade he laid out as a spy is nothing but a mask, amongst other masks that get progressively unpeeled as he approaches closer to his unceremonious end.
When this happens, Reflection in a Dead Diamond becomes much more than a simple pastiche of Mario Bava, Enzo G. Castellari, and notable European artists of that era. Because a pastiche is easy to make, but transcending the aesthetics they’ve established, through multiple callbacks, to create something wholly singular isn’t. All of it is anchored within two note-perfect performances from Testi and Reiner, who are in constant communication with themselves and complete crucial pieces of information that one version of the character doesn’t want revealed.
It makes its denouement all the more affecting and devastating as Cattet and Forzani slowly excavate who John is beneath the masks he wears. When all is revealed, the movie will shatter you into the same millions of pieces that some of the antagonistic figures end up in as the film switches to massive explosions of color and blood is replaced by diamond splatter. The formal daring is certainly a big part of what makes Reflection in a Dead Diamond stand out amongst the bevy of by-committee junk that gets released nowadays, but it’s how the influences are employed that affirms the picture as one of the decade’s most outstanding works of art.
In their recorded introduction at Fantasia, Cattet and Forzani explained that Reflection in a Dead Diamond shares many narrative similarities with Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress, which features a similar fragmented structure, where different temporalities intersect and ultimately reach a sobering conclusion. It’s one of the best animated movies ever made, and it’s no secret that animation plays a big part in the filmmaker’s understanding (and love) of the 7th art that they would want to pay tribute, in a big way, to a film that has profoundly moved them and likely made them realize just how expressive and complex cinema can get.
Cattet and Forzani’s style is so singular that any homage to any filmmaker, past or present, never feels like a carbon copy. That’s why their filmography will always stand the test of time as some of the best-ever genre works you’ll ever see, because it’s always born out of love and passion for the people who made them who they are as serious genre artists, whose films are bound to leave a lasting impact with the audience long after the end credits have rolled, their latest assault to the eyes and ears have been (sort of) assimilated, and all we want is more.
SCORE: ★★★★
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