FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET – If ever I’m forced to pick my favourite Argento movie, it’s never any of the ones from before ‘Deep Red’. The older stuff obviously has its admirers, but I only switched on to him through all the wild phantasmagoria he brought with the likes of ‘Suspiria’ and best of all ‘Inferno’, and I’d even rather go for something as (relatively) middling as ‘Trauma’ than revisit the animal trilogy. On the other hand, I’m glad I rewatched FFOGV. I’d only ever seen it once before, back when Shameless put it out on DVD, and I remember thinking it was sort of OK but maybe a bit of a yawn in the end. This time was different. I think just absorbing Argento a lot more in the interim as a visual stylist has sharpened my sense of what he was about, and things that I’d maybe passed over before struck me as accented and strange in pretty much the same way as anything from his lauded mid seventies / eighties phase. Most of all, what captivates is what he does with the camera, which seems to sculpt the world in the act of filming; it’s like he reaches into space and remoulds it with a mad cinematographic grasp. FFOGV is full of freakish asides, little flourishes that take you from a phone booth to the landline in someone’s cellar through a labyrinth of wires, or that map a fly’s eye view of a journey around a studio; almost throwaway stuff transformed into mad excess. Yeah, I know that’s generally his hallmark anyway, it’s what Argento DOES, it just never struck me as much with the earlier stuff before. And it’s never just gimmickry. You get a real sense of the uncanny coming through with it all, a warped reality unhinged further by a host of other macabre nuances that stretch for the sublime, like the long shadows and empty spaces near the beginning that could’ve stepped from a painting by de Chirico, right through to the crazed slo-mo theatre of the climactic decap. All these touches add up to a spellbinding panorama of distortion, completely convincing as a wonky cinematic microworld. It’s just a shame the other half of FFOGV is shat on by lame humour, drab digressions and a plot that strains to lay down red herrings and conjure up intrigue but just seems a bit daft. But FFOGV is, for me, a movie of moments and fragments, and there are lots of freaky gems in there.
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