An old man (Fabio Testi) sits on the beach of a small town on the French Côte d'Azur and sees a woman on a couch. Already at the beginning needs “Reflection in A Dead Diamond“Just a short moment, a single look at the ocean, to be washed away from a wave of intoxicating image ideas: a glass with bubbling orange bitterly blinds over the woman's body, the carbon dioxide of the drink pours over and turns On her skin in a sea of sharply cut, small diamonds. Dazed by the light that breaks in the stones, the man, a former secret agent named John G., begins to remember.
For decades earlier, an order led him to this coastal town, in which his working partner (Céline Camara) died – killed by a painter (Koen de Bouw) that John was supposed to protect. On one of the artists glued, there are individual shiny sequins of their dress, in which the pain distorted face of the agent is still stated with the death of the death. Now John is no longer on duty, but seems to be still on will under the burden of memory, still wearing a weapon in a halter strapped to the chest under the jacket of a white suit.
Break down the genres to your pure aesthetics
Since her furious debut “Amer-The Dark Side of Dreams” (2009), the films of the Hélène directorate and Bruno Forzani have been revealing the diverse genre cinema of the 1970s. In particular, the stylized excess of the so -called Giallo, Italian thriller, in which directors such as Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci celebrated murder scenes as opulent horror operators, enclosed their previous work like a wildly pulsating bloodstream. The close -ups of flashing knives and eyes, sound that drive through skin, often stage the two director as fetish moments that were detached from stories and completely freed – a single series of visual highlights. Since “corpses under the burning sun” (2017), however, its kind of experimental genre film has increasingly approached narrative forms of cinema.
For “Reflection in A Dead Diamond”, they are now immersed in the picture worlds of the Eurospy films. This short-lived wave from the middle 1960s once tried to refer to the success of the James Bond series in cheaper European co-productions-partly as imaginative imitations, partly in the form of humorous parodies. This means that a new, far more playful tone comes into the work of the duo, which has previously been frozen, but rather underlines her usual preference for perfectly overesthetic violent sequences than would otherwise really change.
“Reflection in A Dead Diamond” is pure aesthetics – and often breathtaking as such.
Instead of a central antagonist, the flash -back world of the film, which is repeatedly triggered by stimuli, quickly fragments into a large number of disguised adversary. Behind countless masks and names there is a chaos of never captured murderers and other miscredenders: be it a hypnotist who can give his victims the feeling of being trapped in a film, or a thief (Thi-May Nguyen), whose leather full body suit becomes a living weapon. The film is devoted to her in the most beautiful sequence: a struggle in a bar that you contested with fingernails made of metal, barbecue attached in the hair and on the shoes instead of stilettos attached knife blades.
In the glitter of the waves and the diamonds, as sparkling images and blinded again and again, the glamor of a long -past, not just cinematic era is also reflected. The lasers that can be operated as typical for agent films as typical as a ring from which an X-ray can be operated from are objects that Cattet and circle forzani in loving close-ups as if they could become portals in a more lustful reality.
A forward -looking bow in front of the seventies cinema
With the 83-year-old, even with gray-made hair and finely shaped beard, beautiful Fabio Testi (“The Syndicate”, “The Secret of the Green Panel”), the two also work for the first time with an actor who once with that wide range of the Italian cinemas of the 70s that they worship, be it Italowestern or police films. Despite all of these references and reversals, however, “Reflection in A Dead Diamond” is never just a nosed quotation cinema, is not content with cinephil hobby. In view of the film history, Cattet and Forzani always search for pictures for the presence of the cinema.
Conclusion: With “Reflection in A Dead Diamond”, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani transform a story based on 60s agent films about an aging spy into a wild glittering picture storm that never just wants to be just cinema.
As “Reflection in A Dead Diamond” saw at the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown as part of the official competition.