Luca Guadagnino reread the classic, signed by Dario Argento in 1977 to convert a tape of terror abstract anchored in the fuzzy logic of dreams a metaphor for explicit modes quiet of domination and punishment of the female body
Interview with Thom York, the author of the soundtrack
complaining about Dario Argento in a recent interview to the efforts of some to return to their work of 1977. “If you try to copy, what for a film? And if the idea is to give a new sense, then it is another thing. Why then use the same title?”. Luca Guadagnino, far from replicating the teacher, is limited to surrender. In its broadest sense. Remember that he discovered the tape with 14 years old, and we literally stayed there to live. His return to Suspiria is, in consequence, a variegated, dense and devoted reading of everything that he felt, thought and experienced in that first encounter with “the terrible” (Guadagnino dixit). But it is also something more: it is an update that wants to be further clarification and exegesis.
In puridad, the effort of the director of Call me by your name has quite a bit of desecration, of sacrilege. And it’s placed in just the right place opposite. Argento reacts to the provocation of the random, indeterminate or unlikely, with a work she herself chaotic that embraces the ambiguous and the indefinite, with vocation suicide. As was already the case in dark Red, the plots of criminals more or less enigmatic poison of stories, dense, thick, oblique and inconsistent. What counts is the fuzzy logic that a few dreams that split in two as the faces illuminated at the time of dark red and bright green.
The Suspiria original was born as an open book in his sense primal and more radical. Matter the voltage of each plane that avoids at all times any temptation narrative. The original inspiration (aside the mythology of the Three mothers imported from Thomas De Quincey) speaks of an actual event suffered as a child, for the co-screenwriter Daria Nicolodi to the time you walk in the traditional stories as the substrate last of the collective memory, of moral sense, atavistic, of every one of the prejudices that give us meaning.
A mix of Alice lost in wonderland, Blue Beard, snow White,
The story of a lost little girl in a school inhabited by witches and powers of evil have so much of Alice lost in wonderland, as Blue Beard, or, according to explicit confession of the director, snow White. In fact, the reference to the use of the color of the first feature-length animated cartoon of the story is one of the parts of the soul, of the tape. The so-called Technicolor three-strip that directly invited them to a little subtle retinal detachment is more than the mere surface of the story, his guts, and reason for being. And all of this is fully saturated. Of blood. The music of Goblin interpreted in the set of the shoot for desquiciar Jessica Harper would be perhaps the last of the elements designed for the disorder.
The viewer was invited to live in terror from a completely new place, by the indefinable and abstract. The decade of the Vietnam war was also a reinvention of a genre that made the pleasure of the fear of his argument. “I cannot even hint what it was… it Was a macabre shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation: the putrid and damp picture of the revelation unhealthy…” writes Lovecraft as a pledge and omen of everything to come. Suspiria was and still is the expression of his time because I was placing the eyes in a place so new and strange. And there he left it: so lost like the world.
Guadagnino doesn’t aspire to much. Or better, longs for exactly the opposite. His reinterpretation want to be the reflected image in a mirror completely clear. If the tape of 1977 was from the first second riddle, all of it thrown around at an empty indecipherable, tense and magnetic, all emotion suspended; now what counts is the decipherment of the keys. Where before what mattered was the feeling of loss, now is the vibration of the melodrama.
In this way, the author of I am love seeks to trace a genealogy of explicit violence from the strength of the speeches of totalitarian to the evidence of the bodies subject. Hand in hand with the term “transfer” used by one of the two characters of Tilda Swinton, the idea is to establish the causal relationship that links the dark, amoral, with the fanatical folly of the myths that inform us. And, a step further, the purpose is no other than to denounce all forms of silenced domain and, therefore, of violence on the woman, the more fustigado of the bodies. Otherwise, the Suspiria Argento is daughter of its time as that of Guadagnino’s yours.
The new movie is once again set in the divided Germany of the late 70’s, with the noise of the terrorism of the RAF in the background, but, in addition, a subplot does it match the memory of nazism with the proliferation perfectly current of sectarianism totalitarian. Guadagnino wants to show how the forces of the horrible looking for the bodies of adolescents in which transferred, in which to become incarnate. Fascism is always the same and the body also submitted. And it is here that metaphor about the transubstantiation of the evil forces where the new Suspiria aspires to become manifest. Intimate and political. The other film. Another time.
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