“Tenebre” by Dario Argento turns 40, the first film forbidden to minors in his career – Corriere.it

On October 28, 1982, “Tenebre”, the eighth feature film by maestro Dario Argento, was released in Italian cinemas. After the dream-surrealist experiments of the pure horror “Suspiria” (1977) and “Inferno” (1980), or the first two chapters of the so-called Trilogy of the Three Mothers (which will have an epilogue only in 2007, with the suffered “The third mother ”), The director forcefully returned to the thriller devoid of supernatural elements that had characterized his career from the debut“ The Bird with the Crystal Feathers ”(1970) to the acclaimed and in its own way revolutionary“ Deep Red ”(1975).

But, in the meantime, the long wave of the Italian “yellow” (inaugurated by Mario Bava and Umberto Lenzi, continued among others by Sergio Martino, Lucio Fulci, Massimo Dallamano and Aldo Lado and brought to its theoretical / imaginative heights by Argento himself) was practically over; the images languished, the fury had died down, the aesthetics of the survivors were already turning towards the inevitable television flattening, the weakening of violence, the weariness of forced repetition. And Argento, well aware of this folding of meaning, branded his return to the genre (signing what was in effect its definitive and mocking epitaph) with an unprecedented ferocity (which cost him the first ban on minors under 18 years of his filmography) and a provocative formal freedom dragging a large part of his postmodernist visual obsessions (such as the passion for architecture and design, borrowed from Antonioni) and his deep knowledge of both the surprise mechanisms of both crime and suspense literature.

In “Tenebre”, the New York crime writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) is in Rome assisted by his assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi) for a series of interviews as his latest novel has surprisingly become a bestseller in Italy; and finds himself at the center of a series of murders that a mysterious serial killer ties closely to his work. After a young kleptomaniac (Ania Pieroni) is brutally murdered after stealing a copy, the writer reunites at a press conference with a lesbian university friend (Mirella D’Angelo) who publicly accuses him of misogyny for the treatment reserved for the victims. women of his books. The latter and her partner will also be massacred by the maniac, after the captain Germani (Giuliano Gemma) and the inspector Altieri (Carola Stagnaro) have delivered the letter addressed to him that the murderer has left his place of his first crime. Interviewed by the wealthy journalist Cristiano Berti (John Steiner) obsessed with punitive morbidity bordering on the psychopathology of his novels, Neal initially believes that he could be the killer; but things get complicated when his ex Jane McKerrow (Veronica Lario), who has been stalking him in secret for some time, joins the game. And when Berti also leaves us his feathers, the discovery of the identity of the culprit seems to recede again.

Also the only screenwriter, Argento wrote the story of “Darkness” in reaction to two specific events: the same accusations of misogyny and cruelty that mockingly in the fiction makes ascribe to the protagonist / double of himself and the telephone harassment of a self-styled fan who said he wanted to assassinate him. The process of elaboration of both led him to reflect on the consequences of the representation of violence in his cinema and to the more or less conscious decision to exorcise everything in a majestic and stunning declaration of total self-referentiality. In the metalinguistic game of the film, Argento is unleashed not only in the longest and most brutal sequence of murders ever staged by him until then, but also in a progressive and brazen derision of the expectations of the public and above all of the iron narrative logic that he always had. his style is distinguished: and if on the one hand it multiplies the guilty and the obvious inconsistencies of the story, on the other it oscillates between the rigor of a photographically icy staging dominated by white lights (in open contrast to the darkness evoked by the title Roma of the magnificent photography by Luciano Tovoli is often deserted in the sun) and sensational baroqueisms (as in the sequence of the murders at Tilde’s house, characterized by unprecedented acrobatics of the camera made possible by the innovative crane LoumaCrane), between bloody flashbacks ambiguously dreamlike and destabilizing for their erotic charge (like the one that sees a young Eva Robin’s significantly involved) and “spla” moments tter “amazing / hilarious in which the blood literally” paints “the screen as a modern art performance (as in the sequence of the severed arm of Veronica Lario, future Mrs. Berlusconi, then heavily censored almost to the expulsion from all copies still circulating on television).

Glad to take pure artifice to its extreme consequences spectacular of his cinema exposing it to the point of abstraction (or gratuitousness), Argento arrived with “Tenebre” at what, in retrospect, was as already said the last and absolute pinnacle of Italian thriller (and at the same time its reverse) as well as of his own Art, then slowly – and inevitably – folded into mannerism after that with “Phenomena” (1985) he performed more or less the same conscious and unbridled deconstruction of his idea of ​​horror. A pivotal film, not only for its author, but for the entire history of Italian genre cinema; that after forty years does not cease to fascinate and amaze, disorient and (be granted) amuse.